Chapter 4

Among our most assiduous visitors was a young man of rank, well
informed, and agreable in his person. After we had spent a few weeks
in London his attentions towards me became marked and his visits more
frequent. I was too much taken up by my own occupations and feelings
to attend much to this, and then indeed I hardly noticed more than the
bare surface of events as they passed around me; but I now remember
that my father was restless and uneasy whenever this person visited
us, and when we talked together watched us with the greatest apparent
anxiety although he himself maintained a profound silence. At length
these obnoxious visits suddenly ceased altogether, but from that
moment I must date the change of my father: a change that to remember
makes me shudder and then filled me with the deepest grief. There were
no degrees which could break my fall from happiness to misery; it was
as the stroke of lightning--sudden and entire.[23] Alas! I now met
frowns where before I had been welcomed only with smiles: he, my
beloved father, shunned me, and either treated me with harshness or a
more heart-breaking coldness. We took no more sweet counsel together;
and when I tried to win him again to me, his anger, and the terrible
emotions that he exhibited drove me to silence and tears.

And this was sudden. The day before we had passed alone together in
the country; I remember we had talked of future travels that we should
undertake together--. There was an eager delight in our tones and
gestures that could only spring from deep & mutual love joined to the
most unrestrained confidence[;] and now the next day, the next hour, I
saw his brows contracted, his eyes fixed in sullen fierceness on the
ground, and his voice so gentle and so dear made me shiver when he
addressed me. Often, when my wandering fancy brought by its various
images now consolation and now aggravation of grief to my heart,[24] I
have compared myself to Proserpine who was gaily and heedlessly
gathering flowers on the sweet plain of Enna, when the King of Hell
snatched her away to the abodes of death and misery. Alas! I who so
lately knew of nought but the joy of life; who had slept only to
dream sweet dreams and awoke to incomparable happiness, I now passed
my days and nights in tears. I who sought and had found joy in the
love-breathing countenance of my father now when I dared fix on him a
supplicating look it was ever answered by an angry frown. I dared not
speak to him; and when sometimes I had worked up courage to meet him
and to ask an explanation one glance at his face where a chaos of
mighty passion seemed for ever struggling made me tremble and shrink
to silence. I was dashed down from heaven to earth as a silly sparrow
when pounced on by a