Left by myself, my mind reverted, with a sense of forlorn wretchedness which it is not in any words that I can find to describe, to my approaching return to the solitude and the despair of my lonely London home. Thoughts of my kind old mother, and of my sister, who had rejoiced with her so innocently over my prospects in Cumberland⁠—thoughts whose long banishment from my heart it was now my shame and my reproach to realise for the first time⁠—came back to me with the loving mournfulness of old, neglected friends. My mother and my sister, what would they feel when I returned to them from my broken engagement, with the confession of my miserable secret⁠—they who had parted from me so hopefully on that last happy night in the Hampstead cottage!