It may be that I have acted foolishly, but let God be the judge whether I have ever struck an unfair blow. I have written these things that the truth might be known, and that no shadow should rest on her who is near me even now; ay, and who is more beautiful than when I first saw her in Truro: she the pure maid with pity shining from her eyes, and I the outcast, the vagabond.
I sit in the library at Pennington as I write this, while my love is romping with the grandest lad in the world, save my eldest son Jasper, whom I hear shouting to his sister Naomi in the garden, while Eli, the dwarf, watches over them as tenderly as if they were his own.