His first appearance was nothing but an insignificant trouble, a mere annoyance to me,--why should I care? I had not thought of him at all for years; and I never had thought of him much. But still I did not want him there: he annoyed me; he was a kind of constant menace of more annoyance to come. But I don’t know what steps I could have taken. It was a long time before I could realise that he would fall in love with Mary. I rather think it is difficult to believe that a man who has loved you will love some one else. That is--if you are quite indifferent to him; it is so much easier then, to believe in his faithfulness. The idea did not occur to me. I feared a little for Mary once or twice, and tried to warn her; but she was always a dreamy sort of girl, and it was hard to tell when a new influence came over her. She had lived in dreams of one kind or other ever since I knew her; and I knew nothing, really nothing, about what was going on, till that unhappy afternoon when he recognised me, and came in and talked foolishly in Mary’s hearing, about things that had happened so long before. Poor child!--I don’t blame her, for her foolishness was natural enough. She thought I had stolen away her lover, as I had stolen away her father. She would not listen to me, and when she did listen to me she did not believe me; and there on the other hand was he, demanding explanations. Good heavens, what right has a man like that to ask explanations--a man one had never cared for, and would have died of? He worried me so that I could not be civil. What with grief, and what with vexation at the turn things had taken, and disappointment in Mary, and illness in myself, I had no patience with the man, maundering on about things that had happened ages before, that were of no importance to any living being. When he waylaid me on my way to her, keeping me back from her, in her agony of temper and mortification and humiliation, what I could have done to him! I was in a nervous state, I suppose, and easily irritated. I could have struck him when he came out and worried me. And there was Mary turning her face to the wall, shutting out the light, shutting her ears, determined to be miserable. Oh! when I toiled up and down stairs going to her, when I felt ill and knew that nobody cared, when I saw her absorbed in her foolish misery, and him tormenting himself and me about dead nonsense that never had been anything, you may excuse me if I had very little patience. After a night of it I got tired and sick of the whole business. It seemed too hard to be obliged to put up with all this folly on the eve of being ill. And who would care whether I was ill or not, if things went on so?