It will be first necessary, however, that I should describe what was the nature of my intercourse with Margaret, during the probationary period which followed our marriage.

Mr. Sherwin’s anxiety was to make my visits to North Villa as few as possible:  he evidently feared the consequences of my seeing his daughter too often.  But on this point, I was resolute enough in asserting my own interests, to overpower any resistance on his part.  I required him to concede to me the right of seeing Margaret every day—­leaving all arrangements of time to depend on his own convenience.  After the due number of objections, he reluctantly acquiesced in my demand.  I was bound by no engagement whatever, limiting the number of my visits to Margaret; and I let him see at the outset, that I was now ready in my turn, to impose conditions on him, as he had already imposed them on me.

Accordingly, it was settled that Margaret and I were to meet every day.  I usually saw her in the evening.  When any alteration in the hour of my visit took place, that alteration was produced by the necessity (which we all recognised alike) of avoiding a meeting with any of Mr. Sherwin’s friends.

Those portions of the day or the evening which I spent with Margaret, were seldom passed altogether in the Elysian idleness of love.  Not content with only enumerating his daughter’s school-accomplishments to me at our first interview, Mr. Sherwin boastfully referred to them again and again, on many subsequent occasions; and even obliged Margaret to display before me, some of her knowledge of languages—­which he never forgot to remind us had been lavishly paid for out of his own pocket.  It was at one of these exhibitions that the idea occurred to me of making a new pleasure for myself out of Margaret’s society, by teaching her really to appreciate and enjoy the literature which she had evidently hitherto only studied as a task.  My fancy revelled by anticipation in all the delights of such an employment as this.  It would be like acting the story of Abelard and Heloise over again—­reviving all the poetry and romance in which those immortal love-studies of old had begun, with none of the guilt and none of the misery that had darkened their end.

I had a definite purpose, besides, in wishing to assume the direction of Margaret’s studies.  Whenever the secret of my marriage was revealed, my pride was concerned in being able to show my wife to every one, as the all-sufficient excuse for any imprudence I might have committed for her sake.  I was determined that my father, especially, should have no other argument against her than the one ungracious argument of her birth—­that he should see her, fitted by the beauty of her mind, as well as by all her other beauties, for the highest station that society could offer.  The thought of this gave me fresh ardour in my project; I assumed my new duties without delay, and continued them with a happiness which never once suffered even a momentary decrease.