sleep, was
sleep's most beneficent substitute.

From this state of calm she was roused by the sudden cessation of the
music; and looking up, she beheld, with a renewal of all her alarms, a
tall man, standing before her, his face and figure both enveloped in the
folds of a huge blanket, from which, however, a pair of gleaming eyes
were seen riveted upon her own countenance. At the same time, she
observed that the old Indian woman had risen, and was stealing softly
from the apartment. Filled with terror, she would have rushed after the
hag, to claim her protection: but she was immediately arrested by the
visitor, who, seizing her by the arm firmly, yet with an air of respect,
and suffering his blanket to drop to the ground, displayed to her gaze
features that had long dwelt, its darkest phantoms, upon her mind. As he
seized her, he muttered, and still with an accent of the most earnest
respect,--"Fear me not, Edith; I am not yet an enemy."

His voice, though one of gentleness, and even of music, completed the
terrors of the captive, who trembled in his hand like a quail in the
clutches of a kite, and would, but for his grasp, as powerful to sustain
as to oppose, have fallen to the floor. Her lips quivered, but they gave
forth no sound; and her eyes were fastened upon his with a wildness and
intensity of glare that showed the fascination, the temporary
self-abandonment of her spirit.

"Fear me not, Edith Forrester," he repeated, with a voice even more
soothing than before: "You know me;--I am no savage;--I will do you no
harm."

"Yes,--yes,--yes," muttered Edith at last, but in the tones of an
automaton, they were, at first, so broken and inarticulate, though they
gathered force and vehemence as she spoke--"I know you,--yes, yes, I do
know you, and know you well. You are Richard Braxley,--the robber, and
now the persecutor of the orphan; and this hand that holds me is red with
the blood of my cousin. Oh, villain! villain! are you not yet content?"

"The prize is not yet won," replied the other, with a smile that seemed
intended to express his contempt of the maiden's invectives, and his
ability to forgive them: "I am indeed Richard Braxley,--the friend of
Edith Forrester, though she will not believe it,--a rough and self-willed
one, it may be, but still her true and unchangeable friend. Where will
she look for a better? Anger has not alienated, contempt has not
estranged me: injury and injustice still find me the same