charge of those very offices
which sobriety and calm reflection might have prescribed. The health of
Miss Melville was materially affected by the surprise and removal she
had undergone at the very time that repose was most necessary for her
preservation. Her fever became more violent; her delirium was stronger;
and the tortures of her imagination were proportioned to the
unfavourableness of the state in which the removal had been effected. It
was highly improbable that she could recover.

In the moments of suspended reason she was perpetually calling on the
name of Falkland. Mr. Falkland, she said, was her first and only love,
and he should be her husband. A moment after she exclaimed upon him in a
disconsolate, yet reproachful tone, for his unworthy deference to the
prejudices of the world. It was very cruel of him to show himself so
proud, and tell her that he would never consent to marry a beggar. But,
if he were proud, she was determined to be proud too. He should see that
she would not conduct herself like a slighted maiden, and that, though
he could reject her, it was not in his power to break her heart. At
another time she imagined she saw Mr. Tyrrel and his engine Grimes,
their hands and garments dropping with blood: and the pathetic
reproaches she vented against them might have affected a heart of stone.
Then the figure of Falkland presented itself to her distracted fancy,
deformed with wounds, and of a deadly paleness, and she shrieked with
agony, while she exclaimed that such was the general hardheartedness,
that no one would make the smallest exertion for his rescue. In such
vicissitudes of pain, perpetually imagining to her self unkindness,
insult, conspiracy, and murder, she passed a considerable part of two
days.

On the evening of the second Mr. Falkland arrived, accompanied by Doctor
Wilson, the physician by whom she had previously been attended. The
scene he was called upon to witness was such as to be most exquisitely
agonising to a man of his acute sensibility. The news of the arrest had
given him an inexpressible shock; he was transported out of himself at
the unexampled malignity of its author. But, when he saw the figure of
Miss Melville, haggard, and a warrant of death written in her
countenance, a victim to the diabolical passions of her kinsman, it
seemed too much to be endured. When he entered, she was in the midst of
one of her fits of delirium, and immediately mistook her visitors for
two