How could I tell you what would inevitably alienate your affections?
That act of my early girlhood by which I had gained an undeserved freedom had been too base; sooner than let you know this blot on my life, I was content to risk the possibility--the inconceivable possibility--of Mr.Brainard's having survived the attack he had made upon his own life.

Can you understand such temerity?
I can not, now that I see its results before me.
"So the die was cast and I became a wife instead of the mere shadow of one.

You were prosperous, and not a sorrow came to disturb my sense of complete security till that day two weeks ago, when, looking up in my own library, I saw, gleaming between me and the evening lamp, a face, which, different as it was in many respects, tore my dead past out of the grave and sent my thoughts reeling back to a lonely road on a black hillside with a lighted window in view, and behind that window the outstretched form of a man with his head among leaves not redder than his blood.
"I have said to you, I have said to others, that a specter rose upon me that day in the library.

It was such to me,--an apparition and nothing else.

Perhaps he meant to impress himself as such, for I had heard no footfall and only looked up because of the constraining force of the look which awaited me.