dward, "I was in
love, and my love was returned. She was a very young girl, who perhaps
(you may tell me) didn't know her own mind. But I knew mine, and I had a
passion for her."

"You had!" exclaimed the Carrier. "You!"

"Indeed I had," returned the other. "And she returned it. I have ever
since believed she did, and now I am sure she did."

"Heaven help me!" said the Carrier. "This is worse than all."

"Constant to her," said Edward, "and returning, full of hope, after many
hardships and perils, to redeem my part of our old contract, I heard,
twenty miles away, that she was false to me; that she had forgotten me;
and had bestowed herself upon another and a richer man. I had no mind
to reproach her; but I wished to see her, and to prove beyond dispute
that this was true. I hoped she might have been forced into it against
her own desire and recollection. It would be small comfort, but it would
be some, I thought, and on I came. That I might have the truth, the real
truth, observing freely for myself, and judging for myself, without
obstruction on the one hand, or presenting my own influence (if I had
any) before her, on the other, I dressed myself unlike myself--you know
how; and waited on the road--you know where. You had no suspicion of me;
neither had--had she," pointing to Dot, "until I whispered in her ear at
that fireside, and she so nearly betrayed me."

"But when she knew that Edward was alive, and had come back," sobbed
Dot, now speaking for herself, as she had burned to do, all through this
narrative; "and when she knew his purpose, she advised him by all means
to keep his secret close; for his old friend John Peerybingle was much
too open in his nature, and too clumsy in all artifice--being a clumsy
man in general," said Dot, half laughing and half crying--"to keep it
for him. And when she--that's me, John," sobbed the little woman--"told
him all, and how his sweetheart had believed him to be dead; and how she
had at last been over-persuaded by her mother into a marriage which the
silly, dear old thing called advantageous; and when she--that's me
again, John--told him they were not yet married (though close upon it),
and that it would be nothing but a sacrifice if it went on, for there
was no love on her side; and when he went nearly mad with joy to hear
it,--then she--that's me again--said she would go between them, as she
had often done before in old times, John, and would sound his
sweetheart, and be