“What am I to do with myself all the morning? I can’t go out, it’s raining. If I open the piano, I shall disturb the industrious journalist who is scribbling in the next room. Oh, dear, it was lonely enough in my lodging in Thorpe Ambrose, but how much lonelier it is here! Shall I read? No; books don’t interest me; I hate the whole tribe of authors. I think I shall look back through these pages, and live my life over again when I was plotting and planning, and finding a new excitement to occupy me in every new hour of the day.
“He might have looked at me, though he was so busy with his writing.—He might have said, ‘How nicely you are dressed this morning!’ He might have remembered—never mind what! All he remembers is the newspaper.”
“Twelve o’clock.—I have been reading and thinking; and, thanks to my Diary, I have got through an hour.
“What a time it was—what a life it was, at Thorpe Ambrose! I wonder I kept my senses. It makes my heart beat, it makes my face flush, only to read about it now!
“The rain still falls, and the journalist still scribbles. I don’t want to think the thoughts of that past time over again. And yet, what else can I do?
“Supposing—I only say supposing—I felt now, as I felt when I traveled to London with Armadale; and when I saw my way to his life as plainly as I saw the man himself all through the journey...?
“I’ll go and look out of the window. I’ll go and count the people as they pass by.
“A funeral has gone by, with the penitents in their black hoods, and the wax torches sputtering in the wet, and the little bell ringing, and the priests droning their monotonous chant. A pleasant sight to meet me at the window! I shall go back to my Diary.
“Supposing I was not the altered woman I am—I only say, supposing—how would the Grand Risk that I once thought of running look now? I have married Midwinter in the name that is really his own. And by doing that I have taken the first of those three steps which were once to lead me, through Armadale’s life, to the fortune and the station of Armadale’s widow. No matter how innocent my intentions might have been on the wedding-day—and they were innocent—this is one of the unalterable results of the marriage. Well, having taken the first step, then, whether I would or no, how—supposing I meant to take the second step, which I don’t—how would present circumstances stand toward me? Would they warn me to draw back, I wonder? or would they encourage me to go on?
“It will interest me to calculate the chances; and I can easily tear the leaf out, and destroy it, if the prospect looks too encouraging.