Edward took my hand and kissed it; I drew it away with great emotion, and exclaimed, "Good God, don't you know what you are doing?"
He did not say another word, and left me abruptly.
For two days afterwards, he spoke to me but little; and when he did so, his manner was cold.
One day that we were taking a walk together in the park, after one or two insignificant observations had passed between us, Edward asked me if I had ever received the book which lie had left for me the year before. As usual, I had it in my pocket; I took it out, and gave it to him, without making any other answer. He opened it and turned the pages over as we walked along.
"Now is the time come," I said to myself; "now!" and the blood forsook my heart, and my legs seemed to fail under me.
In a moment of morbid irritation, I had written on the blank page of the book, the words which had remained coupled in my mind with this gift of Edward's: "Beware; I know your secret!" and now they were before his eyes; and now he was reading them; and now the explanation was at hand; and all that I had suffered before was as nothing, compared to what I had wilfully brought on myself.
He turned to me, and said with a smile, "What do those mysterious words mean?"
I felt as if I was dreaming, but as if in my dream a mountain had been removed from my breast. I laughed hysterically, and said they meant nothing. That was the first time I lied to Edward.
He said that I must have read the book attentively, for he saw that it was marked in different places; he had never marked a book in his life; it was a thing that never occurred to him to do; and then he gave it back to me; and it felt to me as if the air had grown lighter, and the sky bluer, and as if my feet sprang as by magic from the ground they trod on.
When, that evening, I was with Edward again, I looked up into his face, and talked to him as I had not talked to him for nearly two years; I laughed gaily, as in days of old; I saw with exultation that he laughed too, and that he asked Mrs. Middleton to play at chess with my uncle, instead of him, and that he did not leave my side till the last moment that I remained in the drawing-room; and I was foolishly, wickedly happy, till I went up to my room, and laid my head on my pillow; then came, in all its bitterness, the remembrance, that, although he might not know my secret, another did; that if, indeed, he loved me, as I now thought he did (for I remembered that letter to Henry, which I had so long misunderstood, and now recognised its true meaning),—if indeed he loved me, I must, I ought, to tell him the truth; and then he would despise me, he would hate me, not only for the deed itself, but for my long silence,—for my cowardly concealment. No; I had suffered too dreadfully during those minutes when I had felt myself on the brink of unavoidable confession;—that happen what might, I would not, I could not, disclose to him the truth. But should I, then, marry him? Should I inherit my uncle's fortune? Should I become one day the mistress of Elmsley; and, from the midst of all that this world can give of joy, look, as Belshazzar looked on the hand-writing on the wall, on the torrent where my own hand had hurled Mrs. Middleton's child, Edward's cousin; and one day, perhaps, be denounced, betrayed, exposed, by Henry Lovell, whose words began that night to be realised:—"With every throb of love for another, there will be in your heart a pang of fear, a shudder of terror, a thought of me!"