sake of winning the highest prize humanity can bestow: that I certainly
would not have done it for aught less than the highest." After that he
went to his narrow bed. His determination was to write to his uncle,
swallowing bitter pride, and to live a pensioner, if only Cornelia came
to her tryst, "the last he would ask of her," as he told her. Once face
to face with his beloved, he had no doubt of his power; and this feeling
which he knew her to share, made her reluctance to meet him more darkly
suspicious.

As he lay in the little black room, he thought of how she would look
when a bride, and of the peerless beauty towering over any shades of
earthliness which she would present. His heated fancy conjured up every
device and charm of sacredness and adoring rapture about that white
veiled shape, until her march to the altar assumed the character of a
religious procession--a sight to awe mankind! And where, when she
stood before the minister in her saintly humility, grave and white, and
tall--where was the man whose heart was now racing for that goal at her
right hand? He felt at the troubled heart and touched two fingers on the
rib, mock-quietingly, and smiled. Then with great deliberation he rose,
lit a candle, unlocked a case of pocket-pistols, and loaded them: but a
second idea coming into his head, he drew the bullet out of one, and
lay down again with a luxurious speculation on the choice any hand might
possibly make of the life-sparing or death-giving of those two weapons.
In his neat half-slumber he was twice startled by a report of fire-arms
in a church, when a crowd of veiled women and masked men rushed to
the opening, and a woman throwing up the veil from her face knelt to a
corpse that she lifted without effort, and weeping, laid it in a grave,
where it rested and was at peace, though multitudes hurried over it, and
new stars came and went, and the winds were strange with new tongues.
The sleeper saw the morning upon that corpse when light struck his
eyelids, and he awoke like a man who knew no care.

His landlady's little female scrubber was working at the grate in his
sitting-room. He had endured many a struggle to prevent service of this
nature being done for him by one of the sex--at least, to prevent
it within his hearing and sight. He called to her to desist; but she
replied that she had her mistress's orders. Thereupon he maintained that
the grate did not want scrubbing. The girl took this to be a matt