Gradually and insensibly our daily relations towards each other became constrained.  The fond words which I had spoken to her so naturally, in the days of her sorrow and her suffering, faltered strangely on my lips.  In the time when my dread of losing her was most present to my mind, I had always kissed her when she left me at night and when she met me in the morning.  The kiss seemed now to have dropped between us—­to be lost out of our lives.  Our hands began to tremble again when they met.  We hardly ever looked long at one another out of Marian’s presence.  The talk often flagged between us when we were alone.  When I touched her by accident I felt my heart beating fast, as it used to beat at Limmeridge House—­I saw the lovely answering flush glowing again in her cheeks, as if we were back among the Cumberland Hills in our past characters of master and pupil once more.  She had long intervals of silence and thoughtfulness, and denied she had been thinking when Marian asked her the question.  I surprised myself one day neglecting my work to dream over the little water-colour portrait of her which I had taken in the summer-house where we first met—­just as I used to neglect Mr. Fairlie’s drawings to dream over the same likeness when it was newly finished in the bygone time.  Changed as all the circumstances now were, our position towards each other in the golden days of our first companionship seemed to be revived with the revival of our love.  It was as if Time had drifted us back on the wreck of our early hopes to the old familiar shore!

To any other woman I could have spoken the decisive words which I still hesitated to speak to her.  The utter helplessness of her position—­her friendless dependence on all the forbearing gentleness that I could show her—­my fear of touching too soon some secret sensitiveness in her which my instinct as a man might not have been fine enough to discover—­these considerations, and others like them, kept me self-distrustfully silent.  And yet I knew that the restraint on both sides must be ended, that the relations in which we stood towards one another must be altered in some settled manner for the future, and that it rested with me, in the first instance, to recognise the necessity for a change.

The more I thought of our position, the harder the attempt to alter it appeared, while the domestic conditions on which we three had been living together since the winter remained undisturbed.  I cannot account for the capricious state of mind in which this feeling originated, but the idea nevertheless possessed me that some previous change of place and circumstances, some sudden break in the quiet monotony of our lives, so managed as to vary the home aspect under which we had been accustomed to see each other, might prepare the way for me to speak, and might make it easier and less embarrassing for Laura and Marian to hear.

With this purpose in view, I said, one morning, that I thought we had all earned a little holiday and a change of scene.  After some consideration, it was decided that we should go for a fortnight to the seaside.