o account for this singular succession of cause to effect,
as they act upon our emotions, except probably by supposing that it is
an unconscious development of those latent faculties which are decreed
to expand into a full growth in a future state of existence. Be this
as it may, these loving relatives experienced upon that night a mood of
mind such as they had never before known, even when the hand of death
had taken a brother and sister from among them. It was not grief but a
wild kind of dread, slight it is true, but distinct in its character,
and not dissimilar to that fear which falls upon the spirits during one
of those glooms that precede some dark and awful convulsion of nature.
Her father remained up, as we have said, longer than the rest, and in
the silence which succeeded their retirement for the night, his voice
could be occasionally heard in deep and earnest supplication. It was
evident that he had recourse to prayer; and by some of the expressions
caught from time to time, they gathered that "his dear child," and "her
peace of mind" were the object of the foreboding father's devotions.

Jane's distress, at concealing the cause of her absence from prayers,
though acute at the moment of enquiry, was nevertheless more transient
than one might suppose from the alarming effects it produced. Her mind
was at the time in a state of tumult and excitement, such as she had
never till then experienced, and the novel guilt of dissimulation, by
superinducing her first impression of deliberate crime, opposed itself
so powerfully to the exulting sense of her newborn happiness, that both
produced a shock of conflicting emotions which a young mind, already so
much exhausted, could not resist. She felt, therefore, that a strange
darkness shrouded her intellect, in which all distinct traces of
thought, and all memory of the past were momentarily lost. Her frame,
too, at the best but slender and much enfeebled by the preceding
interview with Osborne, and her present embarrassment, could not bear
up against this chaotic struggle between delight and pain. It was, no
doubt, impossible for her relatives to comprehend all this, and hence
their alarm. She was too pure and artless to be suspected of concealing
the truth; and they consequently entertained not the slightest suspicion
of that kind; but still their affections were aroused, and what might
have terminated in an ordinary manner, ended in that unusual mood we
have described.