reputable suburb,
would not have coincided at any one point with the public road where I
had been keeping my station. I sprang forward into the house, up-stairs,
and in rapid succession into every room where it was likely that she
might be found; but everywhere there was a dead silence, disturbed only
by myself, for, in my growing confusion of thought, I believe that I
rang the bell violently in every room I entered. No such summons,
however, was needed, for the servants, two of whom at the least were
most faithful creatures, and devotedly attached to their young mistress,
stood ready of themselves to come and make inquiries of me as soon as
they became aware of the alarming fact that I had returned without her.

Until this moment, though having some private reasons for surprise that
she should have failed to come into the house for a minute or two at the
hour prefixed, in order to make some promised domestic arrangements for
the day, they had taken it for granted that she must have met with me at
some distance from home--and that either the extreme beauty of the day
had beguiled her of all petty household recollections, or (as a
conjecture more in harmony with past experiences) that my impatience and
solicitations had persuaded her to lay aside her own plans for the
moment at the risk of some little domestic inconvenience. Now, however,
in a single instant vanished _every_ mode of accounting for their
mistress's absence; and the consternation of our looks communicated
contagiously, by the most unerring of all languages, from each to the
other what thoughts were uppermost in our panic-stricken hearts. If to
any person it should seem that our alarm was disproportioned to the
occasion, and not justified at least by anything as yet made known to
us, let that person consider the weight due to the two following
facts--first, that from the recency of our settlement in this
neighbourhood, and from the extreme seclusion of my wife's previous life
at a vast distance from the metropolis, she had positively no friends on
her list of visitors who resided in this great capital; secondly, and
far above all beside, let him remember the awful denunciations, so
unexpectedly tallying with this alarming and mysterious absence, of the
Hungarian prophetess; these had been slighted--almost dismissed from our
thoughts; but now in sudden reaction they came back upon us with a
frightful power to lacerate and to sting--the shadowy outline of a
s