Explore "Basil" by Wilkie Collins on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
An epoch in my narrative has now arrived. Up to the time of my marriage, I have appeared as an active agent in the different events I have described. After that period, and -- with one or two exceptional cases -- throughout the whole year of my probation, my position changed with the change in my life, and became a passive one.
During this interval year, certain events happened, some of which, at the time, excited my curiosity, but none my apprehension -- some affected me with a temporary disappointment, but none with even a momentary suspicion. I can now look back on them, as so many timely warnings which I treated with fatal neglect. It is in these events that the history of the long year through which I waited to claim my wife as my own, is really comprised. They marked the lapse of time broadly and significantly; and to them I must now confine myself, as exclusively as may be, in the present portion of my narrative.