e is too interested in me--well, in plain
words, loves me; or, not to degrade that phrase, has a wild passion for
me; and his affection for Caroline is that towards a sister only. That
is the distressing truth; how it has come about I cannot tell, and it
wears upon me.

A hundred little circumstances have revealed this to me, and the longer I
dwell upon it the more agitating does the consideration become. Heaven
only can help me out of the terrible difficulty in which this places me.
I have done nothing to encourage him to be faithless to her. I have
studiously kept out of his way; have persistently refused to be a third
in their interviews. Yet all to no purpose. Some fatality has seemed to
rule, ever since he came to the house, that this disastrous inversion of
things should arise. If I had only foreseen the possibility of it before
he arrived, how gladly would I have departed on some visit or other to
the meanest friend to hinder such an apparent treachery. But I blindly
welcomed him--indeed, made myself particularly agreeable to him for her
sake.

There is no possibility of my suspicions being wrong; not until they have
reached absolute certainty have I dared even to admit the truth to
myself. His conduct to-day would have proved them true had I entertained
no previous apprehensions. Some photographs of myself came for me by
post, and they were handed round at the breakfast table and criticised. I
put them temporarily on a side table, and did not remember them until an
hour afterwards when I was in my own room. On going to fetch them I
discovered him standing at the table with his back towards the door
bending over the photographs, one of which he raised to his lips.

The witnessing this act so frightened me that I crept away to escape
observation. It was the climax to a series of slight and significant
actions all tending to the same conclusion. The question for me now is,
what am I to do? To go away is what first occurs to me, but what reason
can I give Caroline and my father for such a step; besides, it might
precipitate some sort of catastrophe by driving Charles to desperation.
For the present, therefore, I have decided that I can only wait, though
his contiguity is strangely disturbing to me now, and I hardly retain
strength of mind to encounter him. How will the distressing complication
end?

May 19.--And so it has come! My mere avoidance of him has precipitated
the worst issue--a declarat