you could not assist him?'

The woman wept bitterly, as she replied, 'I could not.'

Finding that there was but little prospect of obtaining more information
by prolonging the interview; and anxious to spare the woman's feelings,
which, subdued at first by a violent effort, were now irrepressible and
most painful to witness; the surgeon repeated his promise of calling in
the morning at the appointed hour. His visitor, after giving him a
direction to an obscure part of Walworth, left the house in the same
mysterious manner in which she had entered it.

It will be readily believed that so extraordinary a visit produced a
considerable impression on the mind of the young surgeon; and that he
speculated a great deal and to very little purpose on the possible
circumstances of the case. In common with the generality of people, he
had often heard and read of singular instances, in which a presentiment
of death, at a particular day, or even minute, had been entertained and
realised. At one moment he was inclined to think that the present might
be such a case; but, then, it occurred to him that all the anecdotes of
the kind he had ever heard, were of persons who had been troubled with a
foreboding of their own death. This woman, however, spoke of another
person--a man; and it was impossible to suppose that a mere dream or
delusion of fancy would induce her to speak of his approaching
dissolution with such terrible certainty as she had spoken. It could not
be that the man was to be murdered in the morning, and that the woman,
originally a consenting party, and bound to secrecy by an oath, had
relented, and, though unable to prevent the commission of some outrage on
the victim, had determined to prevent his death if possible, by the
timely interposition of medical aid? The idea of such things happening
within two miles of the metropolis appeared too wild and preposterous to
be entertained beyond the instant. Then, his original impression that
the woman's intellects were disordered, recurred; and, as it was the only
mode of solving the difficulty with any degree of satisfaction, he
obstinately made up his mind to believe that she was mad. Certain
misgivings upon this point, however, stole upon his thoughts at the time,
and presented themselves again and again through the long dull course of
a sleepless night; during which, in spite of all his efforts to the
contrary, he was unable to banish the black veil from his disturb