You have promised not to mention my disfigurement to Lucilla, unless I first give you leave.

I now, more than ever, hold you to that promise.

The few people about me here, are all pledged to secrecy as you are.

If it is really inevitable that she should know the truth--I alone must tell it; in my own way, and at my own time." "If it must come," "if it is really inevitable"-- these phrases in Oscar's letter satisfied me that he was already beginning to comfort himself with an insanely delusive idea--the idea that it might be possible permanently to conceal the ugly personal change in him from Lucilla's knowledge.
If I had been at Dimchurch, I have no doubt I should have begun to feel seriously uneasy at the turn which things appeared to be taking now.
But distance has a very strange effect in altering one's customary way of thinking of affairs at home.

Being in Italy instead of in England, I dismissed Lucilla's antipathies and Oscar's scruples, as both alike unworthy of serious consideration.