The evenings which followed the sketching excursions of the afternoon varied, rather than checked, these innocent, these inevitable familiarities.  My natural fondness for the music which she played with such tender feeling, such delicate womanly taste, and her natural enjoyment of giving me back, by the practice of her art, the pleasure which I had offered to her by the practice of mine, only wove another tie which drew us closer and closer to one another.  The accidents of conversation; the simple habits which regulated even such a little thing as the position of our places at table; the play of Miss Halcombe’s ever-ready raillery, always directed against my anxiety as teacher, while it sparkled over her enthusiasm as pupil; the harmless expression of poor Mrs. Vesey’s drowsy approval, which connected Miss Fairlie and me as two model young people who never disturbed her—­every one of these trifles, and many more, combined to fold us together in the same domestic atmosphere, and to lead us both insensibly to the same hopeless end.

I should have remembered my position, and have put myself secretly on my guard.  I did so, but not till it was too late.  All the discretion, all the experience, which had availed me with other women, and secured me against other temptations, failed me with her.  It had been my profession, for years past, to be in this close contact with young girls of all ages, and of all orders of beauty.  I had accepted the position as part of my calling in life; I had trained myself to leave all the sympathies natural to my age in my employer’s outer hall, as coolly as I left my umbrella there before I went upstairs.  I had long since learnt to understand, composedly and as a matter of course, that my situation in life was considered a guarantee against any of my female pupils feeling more than the most ordinary interest in me, and that I was admitted among beautiful and captivating women much as a harmless domestic animal is admitted among them.  This guardian experience I had gained early; this guardian experience had sternly and strictly guided me straight along my own poor narrow path, without once letting me stray aside, to the right hand or to the left.  And now I and my trusty talisman were parted for the first time.  Yes, my hardly-earned self-control was as completely lost to me as if I had never possessed it; lost to me, as it is lost every day to other men, in other critical situations, where women are concerned.  I know, now, that I should have questioned myself from the first.  I should have asked why any room in the house was better than home to me when she entered it, and barren as a desert when she went out again—­why I always noticed and remembered the little changes in her dress that I had noticed and remembered in no other woman’s before—­why I saw her, heard her, and touched her (when we shook hands at night and morning) as I had never seen, heard, and touched any other woman in my life?  I should have looked into my own heart, and found this new growth springing up there, and plucked it out while it was young.  Why was this easiest, simplest work of self-culture always too much for me?  The explanation has been written already in the three words that were many enough, and plain enough, for my confession.  I loved her.