s
to invalidate our marriage in my lifetime. That is the lawyer's answer
in the lawyer's own words. It relieves me at once--in this direction,
at any rate--of all apprehension about the future. The only imposture
my husband will ever discover--and then only if he happens to be on
the spot--is the imposture that puts me in the place, and gives me the
income of Armadale's widow; and by that time I shall have invalidated
my own marriage forever.

"Half-past two! Midwinter will be here in half an hour. I must go and
ask my glass how I look. I must rouse my invention, and make up my
little domestic romance. Am I feeling nervous about it? Something
flutters in the place where my heart used to be. At five-and-thirty,
too! and after such a life as mine!"

Six o'clock.--He has just gone. The day for our marriage is a day
determined on already.

"I have tried to rest and recover myself. I can't rest. I have come back
to these leaves. There is much to be written in them since Midwinter has
been here, that concerns me nearly.

"Let me begin with what I hate most to remember, and so be the sooner
done with it--let me begin with the paltry string of falsehoods which I
told him about my family troubles.

"What _can_ be the secret of this man's hold on me? How is it that he
alters me so that I hardly know myself again? I was like myself in the
railway carriage yesterday with Armadale. It was surely frightful to be
talking to the living man, through the whole of that long journey, with
the knowledge in me all the while that I meant to be his widow--and yet
I was only excited and fevered. Hour after hour I never shrunk once from
speaking to Armadale; but the first trumpery falsehood I told Midwinter
turned me cold when I saw that he believed it! I felt a dreadful
hysterical choking in the throat when he entreated me not to reveal my
troubles. And once--I am horrified when I think of it--once, when he
said, 'If I _could_ love you more dearly, I should love you more dearly
now,' I was within a hair-breadth of turning traitor to myself. I was
on the very point of crying out to him, 'Lies! all lies! I'm a fiend in
human shape! Marry the wretchedest creature that prowls the streets,
and you will marry a better woman than me!' Yes! the seeing his eyes
moisten, the hearing his voice tremble, while I was deceiving him, shook
me in that way. I have seen handsomer men by hundreds, cleverer men by
dozens. What can this man have roused in me