circumstances.[26] I might waste days in describing how anxiously I
watched every change of fleeting circumstance that promised better
days, and with what despair I found that each effort of mine
aggravated his seeming madness. To tell all my grief I might as well
attempt to count the tears that have fallen from these eyes, or every
sign that has torn my heart. I will be brief for there is in all this
a horror that will not bear many words, and I sink almost a second
time to death while I recall these sad scenes to my memory. Oh, my
beloved father! Indeed you made me miserable beyond all words, but how
truly did I even then forgive you, and how entirely did you possess my
whole heart while I endeavoured, as a rainbow gleams upon a
cataract,[D][27] to soften thy tremendous sorrows.

Thus did this change come about. I seem perhaps to have dashed too
suddenly into the description, but thus suddenly did it happen. In one
sentence I have passed from the idea of unspeakable happiness to that
of unspeakable grief but they were thus closely linked together. We
had remained five months in London three of joy and two of sorrow. My
father and I were now seldom alone or if we were he generally kept
silence with his eyes fixed on the ground--the dark full orbs in which
before I delighted to read all sweet and gentle feeling shadowed from
my sight by their lids and the long lashes that fringed them. When we
were in company he affected gaiety but I wept to hear his hollow
laugh--begun by an empty smile and often ending in a bitter sneer such
as never before this fatal period had wrinkled his lips. When others
were there he often spoke to me and his eyes perpetually followed my
slightest motion. His accents whenever he addressed me were cold and
constrained although his voice would tremble when he perceived that my
full heart choked the answer to words proffered with a mien yet new to
me.