to those evenings at North Villa, I shudder as I look. At this moment,
I see the room again--as in a dream--with the little round table, the
reading lamp, and the open books. Margaret and I are sitting together:
her hand is in mine; my heart is with hers. Love, and Youth, and
Beauty--the mortal Trinity of this world's worship--are there, in that
quiet softly-lit room; but not alone. Away in the dim light behind, is
a solitary figure, ever mournful and ever still. It is a woman's form;
but how wasted and how weak!--a woman's face; but how ghastly and
changeless, with those eyes that are vacant, those lips that are
motionless, those cheeks that the blood never tinges, that the
freshness of health and happiness shall never visit again! Woeful,
warning figure of dumb sorrow and patient pain, to fill the background
of a picture of Love, and Beauty, and Youth!

I am straying from my task. Let me return to my narrative: its course
begins to darken before me apace, while I now write.

The partial restraint and embarrassment, caused at first by the
strange terms on which my wife and I were living together, gradually
vanished before the frequency of my visits to North Villa. We soon
began to speak with all the ease, all the unpremeditated frankness of
a long intimacy. Margaret's powers of conversation were generally only
employed to lead me to exert mine. She was never tired of inducing me
to speak of my family. She listened with every appearance of interest,
while I talked of my father, my sister, or my elder brother; but
whenever she questioned me directly about any of them, her inquiries
invariably led away from their characters and dispositions, to their
personal appearance, their every-day habits, their dress, their
intercourse with the gay world, the things they spent their money on,
and other topics of a similar nature.