Christian read, smiling, but to finish it was like dropping a talisman, and her face clouded.  A sudden draught blew her hair about, and from within, Mr. Treffry’s cough mingled with the soughing of the wind; the sky was fast blackening.  She went indoors, took a pen and began to write: 

“My friend,—­Why haven’t you written to me?  It is so, long to wait.  Uncle says you are in Italy—­it is dreadful not to know for certain.  I feel you would have written if you could; and I can’t help thinking of all the things that may have happened.  I am unhappy.  Uncle Nic is ill; he will not confess it, that is his way; but he is very ill.  Though perhaps you will never see this, I must write down all my thoughts.  Sometimes I feel that I am brutal to be always thinking about you, scheming how to be with you again, when he is lying there so ill.  How good he has always been to me; it is terrible that love should pull one apart so.  Surely love should be beautiful, and peaceful, instead of filling me with bitter, wicked thoughts.  I love you—­and I love him; I feel as if I were torn in two.  Why should it be so?  Why should the beginning of one life mean the ending of another, one love the destruction of another?  I don’t understand.  The same spirit makes me love you and him, the same sympathy, the same trust—­yet it sometimes seems as if I were a criminal in loving you.  You know what he thinks—­he is too honest not to have shown you.  He has talked to me; he likes you in a way, but you are a foreigner—­he says-your life is not my life.  ’He is not the man for you!’ Those were his words.  And now he doesn’t talk to me, but when I am in the room he looks at me—­that’s worse—­a thousand times; when he talks it rouses me to fight—­when it’s his eyes only, I’m a coward at once; I feel I would do anything, anything, only not to hurt him.  Why can’t he see?  Is it because he’s old and we are young?  He may consent, but he will never, never see; it will always hurt him.

“I want to tell you everything; I have had worse thoughts than these —­sometimes I have thought that I should never have the courage to face the struggle which you have to face.  Then I feel quite broken; it is like something giving way in me.  Then I think of you, and it is over; but it has been there, and I am ashamed—­I told you I was a coward.  It’s like the feeling one would have going out into a storm on a dark night, away from a warm fire—­only of the spirit not the body—­which makes it worse.  I had to tell you this; you mustn’t think of it again, I mean to fight it away and forget that it has ever been there.  But Uncle Nic—­what am I to do?  I hate myself because I am young, and he is old and weak—­sometimes I seem even to hate him.  I have all sorts of thoughts, and always at the end of them, like a dark hole at the end of a passage, the thought that I ought to give you up.  Ought I?  Tell me.  I want to know, I want to do what is right; I still want to do that, though sometimes I think I am all made of evil.