om the trouble which you
purposed to take when I last saw you at Cheltenham. I will not tell
you any of the circumstances of this engagement, because I have no
right to presume that you will care to hear them. I hardly dare
to ask you to believe of me that in all that I have done, I have
endeavoured to act with truth and honesty. That I have been very
ignorant, foolish,--what you will that is bad, I know well; otherwise
there could not have been so much in the last few years of my life
on which I am utterly ashamed to look back. For the injury that I
have done you, I can only express deep contrition. I do not dare to
ask you to forgive me.--ALICE VAVASOR." She had tormented herself in
writing this,--had so nearly driven herself distracted with attempts
which she had destroyed, that she would not even read once to herself
these last words. "He'll know it, and that is all that is necessary,"
she said to herself as she sent the letter away from her.

Mr Grey read it twice over, leaving the other letters unnoticed on
the table by his tea-cup. He read it twice over, and the work of
reading it was one to him of intense agony. Hitherto he had fed
himself with hope. That Alice should have been brought to think of
her engagement with him in a spirit of doubt and with a mind so
troubled, that she had been inclined to attempt an escape from it,
had been very grievous to him; but it had been in his mind a fantasy,
a morbid fear of himself, which might be cured by time. He, at any
rate, would give all his energies towards achieving such a cure.
There had been one thing, however, which he most feared;--which he
had chiefly feared, though he had forbidden himself to think that it
could be probable, and this thing had now happened.

He had ever disliked and feared George Vavasor;--not from any effect
which the man had upon himself, for as we know his acquaintance with
Vavasor was of the slightest;--but he had feared and disliked his
influence upon Alice. He had also feared the influence of her cousin
Kate. To have cautioned Alice against her cousins would have been to
him impossible. It was not his nature to express suspicion to one he
loved. Is the tone of that letter remembered in which he had answered
Alice when she informed him that her cousin George was to go with
Kate and her to Switzerland? He had written, with a pleasant joke,
words which Alice had been able to read with some little feeling of
triumph to her two friends. He h