My convalescence rapidly advanced, yet this was the thought that haunted me, and I was for ever forming plans how I might hereafter contrive to escape the tortures that were prepared for me when I should mix in society, and to find that solitude which alone could suit one whom an untold grief seperated from her fellow creatures.  Who can be more solitary even in a crowd than one whose history and the never ending feelings and remembrances arising from it is [sic] known to no living soul.  There was too deep a horror in my tale for confidence; I was on earth the sole depository of my own secret.  I might tell it to the winds and to the desart heaths but I must never among my fellow creatures, either by word or look give allowance to the smallest conjecture of the dread reality:  I must shrink before the eye of man lest he should read my father’s guilt in my glazed eyes:  I must be silent lest my faltering voice should betray unimagined horrors.  Over the deep grave of my secret I must heap an impenetrable heap of false smiles and words:  cunning frauds, treacherous laughter and a mixture of all light deceits would form a mist to blind others and be as the poisonous simoon to me.[44] I, the offspring of love, the child of the woods, the nursling of Nature’s bright self was to submit to this?  I dared not.

How must I escape?  I was rich and young, and had a guardian appointed for me; and all about me would act as if I were one of their great society, while I must keep the secret that I really was cut off from them for ever.  If I fled I should be pursued; in life there was no escape for me:  why then I must die.  I shuddered; I dared not die even though the cold grave held all I loved; although I might say with Job

    Where is now my hope?  For my hope who shall see it?

    They shall go down together to the bars of the pit, when our
    rest together is in the dust—­[45]

Yes my hope was corruption and dust and all to which death brings us.—­Or after life—­No, no, I will not persuade myself to die, I may not, dare not.  And then I wept; yes, warm tears once more struggled into my eyes soothing yet bitter; and after I had wept much and called with unavailing anguish, with outstretched arms, for my cruel father; after my weak frame was exhausted by all variety of plaint I sank once more into reverie, and once more reflected on how I might find that which I most desired; dear to me if aught were dear, a death-like solitude.

I dared not die, but I might feign death, and thus escape from my comforters:  they will believe me united to my father, and so indeed I shall be.  For alone, when no voice can disturb my dream, and no cold eye meet mine to check its fire, then I may commune with his spirit; on a lone heath, at noon or at midnight, still I should be near him.  His last injunction to me was that I should be happy; perhaps he did not mean the shadowy happiness that I promised myself, yet it was that alone which I could taste.  He did not conceive that ever [qu. never?] again I could make one of the smiling hunters that go coursing after bubles that break to nothing when caught, and then after a new one with brighter colours; my hope also had proved a buble, but it had been so lovely, so adorned that I saw none that could attract me after it; besides I was wearied with the pursuit, nearly dead with weariness.