still left to perplex us.  We had identified the unhappy woman whom I had met in the night-time with Anne Catherick—­we had made some advance, at least, towards connecting the probably defective condition of the poor creature’s intellect with the peculiarity of her being dressed all in white, and with the continuance, in her maturer years, of her childish gratitude towards Mrs. Fairlie—­and there, so far as we knew at that time, our discoveries had ended.

The days passed on, the weeks passed on, and the track of the golden autumn wound its bright way visibly through the green summer of the trees.  Peaceful, fast-flowing, happy time! my story glides by you now as swiftly as you once glided by me.  Of all the treasures of enjoyment that you poured so freely into my heart, how much is left me that has purpose and value enough to be written on this page?  Nothing but the saddest of all confessions that a man can make—­the confession of his own folly.

The secret which that confession discloses should be told with little effort, for it has indirectly escaped me already.  The poor weak words, which have failed to describe Miss Fairlie, have succeeded in betraying the sensations she awakened in me.  It is so with us all.  Our words are giants when they do us an injury, and dwarfs when they do us a service.

I loved her.

Ah! how well I know all the sadness and all the mockery that is contained in those three words.  I can sigh over my mournful confession with the tenderest woman who reads it and pities me.  I can laugh at it as bitterly as the hardest man who tosses it from him in contempt.  I loved her!  Feel for me, or despise me, I confess it with the same immovable resolution to own the truth.

Was there no excuse for me?  There was some excuse to be found, surely, in the conditions under which my term of hired service was passed at Limmeridge House.

My morning hours succeeded each other calmly in the quiet and seclusion of my own room.  I had just work enough to do, in mounting my employer’s drawings, to keep my hands and eyes pleasurably employed, while my mind was left free to enjoy the dangerous luxury of its own unbridled thoughts.  A perilous solitude, for it lasted long enough to enervate, not long enough to fortify me.  A perilous solitude, for it was followed by afternoons and evenings spent, day after day and week after week alone in the society of two women, one of whom possessed all the accomplishments of grace, wit, and high-breeding, the other all the charms of beauty, gentleness, and simple truth, that can purify and subdue the heart of man.  Not a day passed, in that dangerous intimacy of teacher and pupil, in which my hand was not close to Miss Fairlie’s; my cheek, as we bent together over her sketch-book, almost touching hers.  The more attentively she watched every movement of my brush, the more closely I was breathing the perfume of her hair, and the warm fragrance of her breath.  It was part of my service to live in the very light of her eyes—­at one time to be bending over her, so close to her bosom as to tremble at the thought of touching it; at another, to feel her bending over me, bending so close to see what I was about, that her voice sank low when she spoke to me, and her ribbons brushed my cheek in the wind before she could draw them back.