tude, and throughout my illness the sound of his
step on the stairs has had the power of quickening my pulse--I have
loved him so and love him. Now if he had said last summer that he was
reluctant for me to leave him--if he had even allowed me to think
_by mistake_ that his affection for me was the motive of such
reluctance--I was ready to give up Pisa in a moment, and I told him
as much. Whatever my new impulses towards life were, my love for him
(taken so) would have resisted all--I loved him so dearly. But his
course was otherwise, quite otherwise, and I was wounded to the
bottom of my heart--cast off when I was ready to cling to him. In the
meanwhile, at my side was another; I was driven and I was drawn. Then
at last I said, 'If you like to let this winter decide it, you may. I
will allow of no promises nor engagement. I cannot go to Italy, and I
know, as nearly as a human creature can know any fact, that I shall be
ill again through the influence of this English winter. If I am, you
will see plainer the foolishness of this persistence; if I am not, I
will do what you please.' And his answer was, 'If you are ill and keep
your resolution of not marrying me under those circumstances, I will
keep mine and love you till God shall take us both.' This was in last
autumn, and the winter came with its miraculous mildness, as you know,
and I was saved as I dared not hope; my word therefore was claimed
in the spring. Now do you understand, and will you feel for me? An
application to my father was certainly the obvious course, if it had
not been for his peculiar nature and my peculiar position. But there
is no speculation in the case; it is a matter of _knowledge_ that if
Robert had applied to him in the first instance he would have been
forbidden the house without a moment's scruple; and if in the last (as
my sisters thought best as a respectable _form_), I should have been
incapacitated from any after-exertion by the horrible scenes to which,
as a thing of course, I should have been exposed. Papa will not bear
some subjects, it is a thing _known_; his peculiarity takes that
ground to the largest. Not one of his children will ever marry without
a breach, which we all know, though he probably does not--deceiving
himself in a setting up of _obstacles_, whereas the real obstacle is
in his own mind. In my case there was, or would have been, a great
deal of apparent reason to hold by; my health would have been motive
enough--ostens