I have spent the day in bitter grief.  Ever since I was a child there has been a dark shadow between my father and me.  He was like a beetling mountain, always hanging over my head.  I wonder whether he wished to see me at the end.  Perhaps he did, and was over-persuaded by the cold and savourless nature of Nessy MacLeod, who is giving it out, I hear, that grief and shame for me killed him.

People will say he was a vulgar parvenu, a sycophant, a snob—­heaven knows what.  All wrong!  For the true reading of his character one has to go back to the day when he was a ragged boy and the liveried coachman of the “bad Lord Raa” lashed at his mother on the road, and he swore that when he was a man she should have a carriage of her own, and then “nobody should never lash her.”

He found Gessler’s cap in the market-place and was no more willing than Tell to bend the knee to it.

My poor father!  He did wrong to use another life, another soul, for either his pride or his revenge.  But God knows best how it will be with him, and if he was the first cause of making my life what it has been, I send after him (I almost tremble to say it) if not my love, my forgiveness.

* * * * *

JULY 26.  I begin to realise that after all I was not romancing when I told the old dears that Martin and his schemes would collapse if I failed him.  Poor boy, he is always talking as it everything depended upon me.  It is utterly frightening to think what would happen to the Expedition if he thought I could not sail with him on the sixteenth.

Martin is not one of the men who weep for their wives as if the sun had suffered eclipse, and then marry again before their graves are green.  So, having begun on my great scheme of pretending that I am getting better every day, and shall be “ready to go, never fear,” I have to keep it up.

I begin to suspect, though, that I am not such a wonderful actress after all.  Sometimes in the midst of my raptures I see him looking at me uneasily as if he were conscious of a certain effort.  At such moments I have to avoid his eyes lest anything should happen, for my great love seems to be always lying in wait to break down my make-believe.

To-day (though I had resolved not to give way to tears) when he was talking about the voyage out, and how it would “set me up” and how the invigorating air of the Antarctic would “make another woman of me,” I cried: 

“How splendid!  How glorious!”

“Then why are you crying?” he asked.

“Oh, good gracious, that’s nothing—­for me,” I answered.

But if I am throwing dust in Martin’s eyes I am deceiving nobody else, it seems.  To-night after he and Dr. O’Sullivan had gone back to the “Plough,” Father Dan came in to ask Christian Ann how she found me, and being answered rather sadly, I heard him say: 

“Ugh cha nee! [Woe is me!] What is life?  It is even a vapour which appeareth for a little while and then vanisheth away.”