"Why didn't I speak to you! why didn't I speak to you!

"I wonder whether the risks and difficulties of keeping the nightgown

were as much as I could manage, without having other risks and

difficulties added to them? This might have been the case with some

women--but how could it be the case with me? In the days when I was

a thief, I had run fifty times greater risks, and found my way out of

difficulties to which THIS difficulty was mere child's play. I had been

apprenticed, as you may say, to frauds and deceptions--some of them on

such a grand scale, and managed so cleverly, that they became famous,

and appeared in the newspapers. Was such a little thing as the keeping

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of the nightgown likely to weigh on my spirits, and to set my heart

sinking within me, at the time when I ought to have spoken to you? What

nonsense to ask the question! The thing couldn't be.

"Where is the use of my dwelling in this way on my own folly? The plain

truth is plain enough, surely? Behind your back, I loved you with all

my heart and soul. Before your face--there's no denying it--I was

frightened of you; frightened of making you angry with me; frightened

of what you might say to me (though you HAD taken the Diamond) if I

presumed to tell you that I had found it out. I had gone as near to it

as I dared when I spoke to you in the library. You had not turned your

back on me then. You had not started away from me as if I had got the

plague. I tried to provoke myself into feeling angry with you, and to

rouse up my courage in that way. No! I couldn't feel anything but the

misery and the mortification of it. You're a plain girl; you have got

a crooked shoulder; you're only a housemaid--what do you mean by

attempting to speak to Me?" You never uttered a word of that, Mr.

Franklin; but you said it all to me, nevertheless! Is such madness as

this to be accounted for? No. There is nothing to be done but to confess

it, and let it be.

"I ask your pardon, once more, for this wandering of my pen. There is no

fear of its happening again. I am close at the end now.

"The first person who disturbed me by coming into the empty room was

Penelope. She had found out my secret long since, and she had done her

best to bring me to my senses--and done it kindly too.

"'Ah!' she said, 'I know why you're sitting here, and fretting, all by

yourself. The best thing that can happen for your advantage, Rosanna,

will be for Mr. Franklin's visit here to come to an end. It's my belief

that he won't be long now before he leaves the house."




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