all alike, the memories of our love.

Gradually and insensibly our daily relations towards each other became
constrained. The fond words which I had spoken to her so naturally, in
the days of her sorrow and her suffering, faltered strangely on my
lips. In the time when my dread of losing her was most present to my
mind, I had always kissed her when she left me at night and when she
met me in the morning. The kiss seemed now to have dropped between
us--to be lost out of our lives. Our hands began to tremble again when
they met. We hardly ever looked long at one another out of Marian's
presence. The talk often flagged between us when we were alone. When
I touched her by accident I felt my heart beating fast, as it used to
beat at Limmeridge House--I saw the lovely answering flush glowing
again in her cheeks, as if we were back among the Cumberland Hills in
our past characters of master and pupil once more. She had long
intervals of silence and thoughtfulness, and denied she had been
thinking when Marian asked her the question. I surprised myself one
day neglecting my work to dream over the little water-colour portrait
of her which I had taken in the summer-house where we first met--just
as I used to neglect Mr. Fairlie's drawings to dream over the same
likeness when it was newly finished in the bygone time. Changed as all
the circumstances now were, our position towards each other in the
golden days of our first companionship seemed to be revived with the
revival of our love. It was as if Time had drifted us back on the wreck
of our early hopes to the old familiar shore!

To any other woman I could have spoken the decisive words which I still
hesitated to speak to HER. The utter helplessness of her position--her
friendless dependence on all the forbearing gentleness that I could
show her--my fear of touching too soon some secret sensitiveness in her
which my instinct as a man might not have been fine enough to
discover--these considerations, and others like them, kept me
self-distrustfully silent. And yet I knew that the restraint on both
sides must be ended, that the relations in which we stood towards one
another must be altered in some settled manner for the future, and that
it rested with me, in the first instance, to recognise the necessity
for a change.

The more I thought of our position, the harder the attempt to alter it
appeared, while the domestic conditions on which we three had been
living toget