ng of a fire. There was a truth in those
ravings--a reason in that incoherence--and my cup was not yet full.

"At last, one physician, who appeared to me to have more knowledge than
the rest of the mysterious workings of her dreadful disease, advised me
to take her to the scenes of her first childhood: 'Those scenes,' said
he, justly, 'are in all stages of life, the most fondly remembered; and
I have noted, that in many cases of insanity, places are easier recalled
than persons: perhaps, if we can once awaken one link in the chain, it
will communicate to the rest.'

"I took this advice, and set off to Norfolk. Her early home was not many
miles distant from the churchyard where you once met me, and in that
churchyard her mother was buried. She had died before Gertrude's flight;
the father's death had followed it: perhaps my sufferings were a
just retribution. The house had gone into other hands, and I had no
difficulty in engaging it. Thank Heaven, I was spared the pain of seeing
any of Gertrude's relations.

"It was night when we moved to the house. I had placed within the room
where she used to sleep, all the furniture and books, with which it
appeared, from my inquiries, to have been formerly filled. We laid her
in the bed that had held that faded and altered form, in its freshest
and purest years. I shrouded myself in one corner of the room, and
counted the dull minutes till the daylight dawned. I pass over the
detail of my recital--the experiment partially succeeded--would to God
that it had not! would that she had gone down to her grave with her
dreadful secret unrevealed! would--but--"

Here Glanville's voice failed him, and there was a brief silence before
he recommenced.

"Gertrude now had many lucid intervals; but these my presence were
always sufficient to change into a delirious raving, even more
incoherent than her insanity had ever yet been. She would fly from me
with the most fearful cries, bury her face in her hands, and seem like
one oppressed and haunted by a supernatural visitation, as long as I
remained in the room; the moment I left her, she began, though slowly,
to recover.

"This was to me the bitterest affliction of all--to be forbidden to
nurse, to cherish, to tend her, was like taking from me my last hope!
But little can the thoughtless or the worldly dream of the depths of a
real love; I used to wait all day by her door, and it was luxury enough
to me to catch her accents or hear her mov