I loved her.

Ah! how well I know all the sadness and all the mockery that is
contained in those three words. I can sigh over my mournful
confession with the tenderest woman who reads it and pities me. I
can laugh at it as bitterly as the hardest man who tosses it from
him in contempt. I loved her! Feel for me, or despise me, I
confess it with the same immovable resolution to own the truth.

Was there no excuse for me? There was some excuse to be found,
surely, in the conditions under which my term of hired service was
passed at Limmeridge House.

My morning hours succeeded each other calmly in the quiet and
seclusion of my own room. I had just work enough to do, in
mounting my employer's drawings, to keep my hands and eyes
pleasurably employed, while my mind was left free to enjoy the
dangerous luxury of its own unbridled thoughts. A perilous
solitude, for it lasted long enough to enervate, not long enough
to fortify me. A perilous solitude, for it was followed by
afternoons and evenings spent, day after day and week after week
alone in the society of two women, one of whom possessed all the
accomplishments of grace, wit, and high-breeding, the other all
the charms of beauty, gentleness, and simple truth, that can
purify and subdue the heart of man. Not a day passed, in that
dangerous intimacy of teacher and pupil, in which my hand was not
close to Miss Fairlie's; my cheek, as we bent together over her
sketch-book, almost touching hers. The more attentively she
watched every movement of my brush, the more closely I was
breathing the perfume of her hair, and the warm fragrance of her