She only waits a word of reply from me to make the
journey to Yorkshire, and to be present as one of the witnesses on the
night when the opium is tried for the second time.
Here, again, there is a motive under the surface; and, here again, I
fancy that I can find it out.
What she has forbidden me to tell Mr. Franklin Blake, she is (as I
interpret it) eager to tell him with her own lips, BEFORE he is put
to the test which is to vindicate his character in the eyes of other
people. I understand and admire this generous anxiety to acquit him,
without waiting until his innocence may, or may not, be proved. It
is the atonement that she is longing to make, poor girl, after having
innocently and inevitably wronged him. But the thing cannot be done. I
have no sort of doubt that the agitation which a meeting between them
would produce on both sides--reviving dormant feelings, appealing to old
memories, awakening new hopes--would, in their effect on the mind of Mr.
Blake, be almost certainly fatal to the success of our experiment. It is
hard enough, as things are, to reproduce in him the conditions as they
existed, or nearly as they existed, last year.
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