he
execution of his deadly design.

He remembered how, from the very first day when he had seen her, she
had mysteriously influenced the whole progress of his life; how his
ardour to possess her had altered his occupations, and even interrupted
his amusements; how all his energy and all his wealth had been baffled
in the attempt to discover her when she fled from her father's house;
how the first feeling of remorse that he had ever known had been
awakened within him by his knowledge of the share he had had in
producing her unhappy fate. Recalling all this; reflecting that, had
she approached him at an earlier period, she would have been driven
back affrighted by the drunken clamour of his companions; and had she
arrived at a later, would have found his palace in flames; thinking at
the same time of her sudden presence in the banqueting-hall when he had
believed her to be dead, when her appearance at the moment before he
fired the pile was most irresistible in its supernatural influence over
his actions--that vague feeling of superstitious dread which exists
intuitively in all men's minds, which had never before been aroused in
his, thrilled through him. His eyes were fixed on the door by which
she had departed, as if he expected her to return. Her destiny seemed
to be portentously mingled with his own; his life seemed to move, his
death to wait at her bidding. There was no repentance, no moral
purification in the emotions which now suspended his bodily faculties
in inaction; he was struck for the time with a mental paralysis.

The restless moments moved onward and onward, and still he delayed the
consummation of the ruin which the night's debauch had begun. Slowly
the tender daylight grew and brightened in its beauty, warmed the cold
prostrate bodies in the silent hall, and dimmed the faint glow of the
wasting lamp; no black mist of smoke, no red glare of devouring fire
arose to quench its fair lustre; no roar of flames interrupted the
murmuring morning tranquillity of nature, or startled from their heavy
repose the exhausted outcasts stretched upon the pavement of the
street. Still the noble palace stood unshaken on its firm foundations;
still the adornments of its porticoes and its statues glittered as of
old in the rays of the rising sun; and still the hand of the master who
had sworn to destroy it, as he had sworn to destroy himself, hung idly
near the torch which lay already extinguished in harmless ashes at