to me became unbounded; as if he
wished to make up to me for some wrong.
I need not say how soon I forgave him, nor
how much I loved him again. All my love
came back in one full boundless tide; and
the current of my being set towards him
again as before. If he had asked me for
my life then, as his mere fancy, to destroy, I
would have given it him. I would have lain
down and died, if he had wished to see
the flowers grow over my grave.

My husband and Ellen grew more estranged
as his affection seemed to return to me. His
manner to her was defying; hers to him
contemptuous. I heard her call him villain
once, in the garden below the windows; at
which he laughed—his wicked laugh, and
said " tell her, and see if she will believe
you!"

I was sitting in the window, working. It
was a cold damp day in the late autumn,
when those chill fogs of November are just
beginning; those fogs with the frost in them,
that steal into one's very heart. It was a day
when a visible blight is in the air, when
death is abroad everywhere, and suffering and
crime. I was alone in the drawing-room.
Ellen was upstairs, and my husband, as
I believed, in the City. But I have remembered
since, that I heard the hall-door
softly opened, and a footstep steal quietly by
the drawing room up the stairs. The evening
was just beginning to close in—dull, gray,
and ghostlike; the dying daylight melting
into the long shadows that stalked like
wandering ghosts about the fresh-made grave
of nature. I sat working still, at some of
those small garments about which I dreamed
such fond dreams, and wove such large
hopes of happiness; and as I sat, while
the evening fell heavy about me, a mysterious
shadow of evil passed over me, a dread presentiment,
a consciousness of ill, that made me
tremble, as if in ague—angry at myself though
for my folly. But, it was reality. It was no
hysterical sinking of the spirits that I felt;
no mere nervousness or cowardice; it was
something I had never known before; a
knowledge, a presence, a power, a warning
word, a spirit's cry, that had swept by me as
the fearful evil marched on to its conclusion.

I heard a faint scream up stairs. It
was so faint I could scarcely distinguish it
from a sudden rush of wind through an
opening door, or the chirp of a mouse behind
the wainscot. Presently, I heard the same
sound again; and then a dull muffled noise
overhead, as of some one walking heavily, or
dragging a heavy weight across the floor. I
sat petrified by fear. A nameless agony
was upon me that deprived me of all power
of action. I thought of Harry and I
thought of Ellen, in an inextricable cypher
of misery and agony; but I could not have
defined a line in my own mind; I could
not have explained what it was I feared.
I only knew that it was sorrow that was to
come, and sin. I listened, but all was still
again; once only, I thought I heard a low
moan, and once a muttering voice—which I
know now to have been my husband's, speaking
passionately to himself.

And then his voice swept stormfully
through the house, crying wildly, " Mary,
Mary! Quick here! Your sister! Ellen!"

I ran up-stairs. It seems to me now, that
I almost flew. I found Ellen lying on the
floor of her own room, just inside the door;
her feet towards the door of my husband's
study, which was immediately opposite her
room. She was fainting; at least I thought
so then. We raised her up between us; my
husband trembling more than I; and I unfastened
her gown, and threw water on her
face, and pushed back her hair; but she did
not revive. I told Harry to go for a doctor.
A horrid thought was stealing over me;
but he lingered, as I fancied, unaccountably
and cruelly, though I twice asked him to go.
Then, I thought that perhaps he was too
much overcome; so I went to him, and
kissed him, and said, " She will soon be better,
Harry," cheerfully, to cheer him. But I felt
in my heart that she was no more.

At last, after many urgent entreaties, and
after the servants had come up, clustering in
a frightened way round the bed—but he sent
them away again immediately—he put on his
hat, and went out, soon returning with a
strange man; not our own doctor. This man
was rude and coarse, and ordered me aside,
as I stood bathing my sister's face, and
pulled her arm and hand roughly, to see
how dead they fell, and stooped down close
to her lips—I thought he touched them even
—all in a violent and insolent way, that
shocked me and bewildered me. My husband
stood in the shadow, ghastly pale, but not
interfering.

It was too true, what the strange man
had said so coarsely. She was dead. Yes;
the creature that an hour ago had been so
full of life, so beautiful, so resolute, and
young, was now a stiffening corpse, inanimate
and dead, without life and without
hope. Oh! that word had set my brain
on fire! Dead! here, in my house, under
my roof—dead so mysteriously, so strangely
—why? How? It was a fearful dream,
it was no truth that lay there. I was in
a nightmare; I was not sane; and thinking
how ghastly it all was, I fainted softly
on the bed, no one knowing, till some
time after, that I had fallen, and was not
praying. When I recovered I was in my
own room, alone. Crawling feebly to my
sister's door, I found that she had been
washed and dressed, and was now laid out
on her bed. It struck me that all had been
done in strange haste; Harry telling me the
servants had done it while I fainted. I knew
afterwards that he had told them it was I,
and that I would have no help. The mystery
of it all was soon to be unravelled.