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.