Feb. 5.—Writing has been absolutely impossible for a long while; but I now reach a stage at which it seems possible to down a line.  Caroline’s recovery, extending over four months, has been very ; at first slow, latterly rapid.  But a fearful complication of affairs attends it!  
O what a web we weave
When first we practise to deceive!
 
Charles has written reproachfully to me from Venice, where he is.  He says how can he fulfil in the real what he has in the , while he still loves me?  Yet how, on the other hand, can he leave it unfulfilled?  All this time I have not told her, and up to this minute she believes that he has indeed taken her for better, for worse, till death them do part.  It is a position for me, and all three.  In the awful approach of death, one’s loses its balance, and we do anything to meet the of the moment, with a single eye to the one who excites our sympathy, and from whom we seem on the of being separated for ever.
 
Had he really married her at that time all would be settled now.  But he took too much thought; she might have died, and then he had his reason.  If indeed it had turned out so, I should now be perhaps a sad woman; but not a tempest-tossed one . . . The possibility of his claiming me after all is what lies at the root of my .  Everything hangs by a thread.  Suppose I tell her the marriage was a mockery; suppose she is indignant with me and with him for the deception—and then?  Otherwise, suppose she is not indignant but forgives all; he is bound to marry her; and honour me to urge him thereto, in spite of what he protests, and to smooth the way to this issue by my method of informing her.  I have meant to tell her the last month—ever since she has been strong enough to bear such tidings; but I have been without the power—the moral force.  Surely I must write, and get him to come and assist me.
 
March 14.—She continually wonders why he does not come, the five months of his enforced absence having expired; and still more she wonders why he does not write oftener.  His last letter was cold, she says, and she fears he regrets his marriage, which he may only have with her for pity’s sake, thinking she was sure to die.  It makes one’s heart bleed to hear her thus so near the truth, and yet never discerning its actual shape.
 
A trouble me, too, in the person of the young reader, whose conscience him for the part he played.  Surely I am punished, if ever woman were, for a too ingenious of her better judgment!
 
April 2.—She is practically well.  The faint pink revives in her cheek, though it is not quite so full as heretofore.  But she still wonders what she can have done to offend ‘her dear husband,’ and I have been obliged to tell the smallest part of the truth—an unimportant fragment of the whole, in fact, I said that I feared for the moment he might regret the precipitancy of the act, which her illness caused, his affairs not having been quite advanced for marriage just then, though he will doubtless come to her as soon as he has a home ready.  Meanwhile I have written to him, , to come and relieve me in this awful .  He will find no note of love in that.
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