ago I wrote in this diary that no child of mine should ever be born into slavery and dishonour. Alas, poor foolish Penelope! What ill-omened words were those! And yet I cannot believe that God would have visited their presumptuousness upon me with such horrid irony. May God, who knows all things, must know that those words were even more justified than I dreamed of at the time: the slavery and dishonour surpassing my most evil apprehensions. Indeed, may it not be that in taking away our child while yet unborn He did so in His mercy to it and to its wretched parents? Surely. And if my husband surprised me, some months back, by his indifference in the face of what we were about to gain, 'tis he, perhaps, who is surprised in his turn at the strange resignation with which I take my loss. For indeed, I am resigned, am acquiescent, and, below the regrets which come shuddering across me, I feel a marvellous peacefulness in the depths of my being. No! no child should ever be born in such a house, into such a life as this....

I am still shattered in body (I understand that for days recovery was given up as hopeless), and my mind seems misty, and like what a ghost's might be, after so many hours of unconsciousness, and of what, had it endured, would have been called death. But little by little shreds of recollection are coming back to me, and I will write them down. Some strangely sweet ones. The sense, even as life was slipping away, that all Eustace's love and tenderness had returned; that it was he (for no physician could be got, or was allowed, in this dreadful place) he himself who wrestled for me with death, and brought me back to life.

Moments return to my memory of surpassing, unspeakable sweetness, which penetrated through all pain: being lifted in his arms, handled like a child; seeing his eyes, which seemed to hold and surround me like his arms; and hearing his words as when he thanked God, over and over again, and almost like one demented, for having caused him to study medicine. I felt I was re-entering life upon the strong, full tide of incomparable love.

Let me not seem ungrateful, for I am not. Most strangely there has mingled in this great flood of life-giving tenderness the sense also of the affection of poor Mrs. Davies. I call her poor, because there is, I know not why, something oddly pathetic in her sudden devotion to me. When I met her wild eyes grown quite tender and heard her crooning exclamations in her unintelligible language, I had, even in the midst of my own weakness, the sort of half pitying gratitude which we feel for the love of an animal, of something strong and naturally savage, grown very gentle towards one.

July 5, 1773.

Is that hideous thing true? Did it ever happen? Or is some shred of nightmare returning ever and again out of the black depths of my sickness? It comes and goes, and every time new doubts—hope it may be a dream, fear it may be reality—come with it.

It was three days after the shipwreck; the weather had calmed, and for the first time I ventured abroad into the park. That much and a little more is real, and bears in my mind the indescribable quality of certainty. I had wandered down the glen and through the churchyard, and I remember pausing before the great stone cross, covered with curious basket work patterns, and wondering whether when it was made—a thousand years ago—women about to be mothers had felt as great perplexity and loneliness as I, and at the same time, as great joy. I crossed the piece of boggy meadow, vivid green in the fitful sunshine, and climbed upon the sea-wall and sat down. I was tired; and the solitude, the sunshine, the faint silken rustle of the sea on the reefs, the salt smell—all filled me with a languid happiness quite unspeakable. All this I know, I am certain of, as the scratching of my pen; in fact, those moments on the sea-wall are, in a manner, the latest thing of which I have vivid certainty; all that came later—my illness, the news of my miscarriage, my recovery, and even this present moment, seeming comparatively unreal. I do not know how long I may have sat there. I was listening to the sea, to the wind in my hair, and watching the foam running in little feathery balls along the sand, when I heard voices, and saw three men wading among the rocks a little way off, as if in search of something. My eyes followed them lazily, and then I saw close under me, what I had taken at first for a heap of seaweed and sea refuse cast upon the sand, but which, as my eyes fixed it, became—or methought it became—something hideous and terrible; so that for very horror I could not shriek. And then, while my eyes were fixed on it, methought (for as I write it seems a dream) the three men waded over in its direction, and one silently pointed it out to the other. They came round, one turned a moment, and instead of a human face, I saw under his looped-up hat a loosely fitting black mask. Then they gathered round that thing the three of them, and touched it with a boat-hook, muttering to each other. Then one stooped down and did I know not what, stuffing, as he did so, something into the pockets of his coat, and then put out a hand to one of his companions, receiving back something narrow, which caught a glint of sun. They all three stooped together; methought the water against the sands and the pale foam heaps suddenly changed colour, but that must surely be my nightmare.

"Better like that," a voice said in English. Between them they raised the thing up and carried it through the shallow water to a boat moored by the rocks. And then my voice became loosened. I gave a cry, which seemed to echo all round, and I jumped down from the sea-wall, and flew across the meadow and tore up the glen, till I fell full length by the neglected pond with the broken leaden nymph. For as they took it up, the thing had divided in two, and somehow I had known the one was a mother and the other a child; one was I, and the other I still carried within me. And the voice which had said "Better like that" was Hubert's. But as I write, I know it must have been a vision of my sickness.

"Eustace," I asked, "how did it begin? Did I dream—or did you find me lying by the fountain on the terrace—the fountain of your poor water snake?"

"Forget it, dearest," Eustace said, very quietly and sweetly, and with the old gentle truthfulness in his eyes. "You must have over-walked that hot morning and got a sunstroke or fainted with fatigue. We did find you by the fountain—that is to say, our good Mrs. Davies did." And Davies merely nodded.

July 15, 1773.

Shall I ever know whether it really happened? Methinks that had I certainty I could face, stand up to, it. But to go on sinking and weltering in this hideous doubt!

August 1, 1773.

The certainty has come; and God in Heaven, what undreamed certainties besides! I did not really want it, though I told myself I did. For I felt that Mrs. Davies knew, that she was watching her opportunity to tell me; and I, a coward, evading what I must some day learn. At last it has come.

It was this morning. This morning! It seems weeks and months ago—a whole lifetime passed since! She was brushing my hair, one of the many services required by my weakness, and which she performs with wonderful tenderness. We saw one another's face, but only reflected in the mirror; and I recognised when she was going to speak.

"Lady Brandling," she said in her odd Welsh way—"Lady Brandling fell ill because she saw some things from the sea-wall."

I knew what she meant—for are not my own thoughts for ever going over that same ground? But the sense of being surrounded by enemies, the whole horrid mystery about this accursed place, have taught me caution and even cunning. Davies has been as a mother to me in my illness; but I remembered my first impression of her unfriendliness towards Eustace and me, and of her being put to spy upon us. So I affected not to understand; and indeed, her singular mixture of