He stopped at last, and gazed at her earnestly.
"Yes, you, too, are his descendant; you know that such men have lived
and suffered; you will not mock me,--you will not disbelieve! Listen!
hark!--what sound is that?"

"But the wind on the house-top, Clarence,--but the wind."

"Give me your hand; let me feel its living clasp; and when I have told
you, never revert to the tale again. Conceal it from all: swear that it
shall die with us,--the last of our predestined race!"

"Never will I betray your trust; I swear it,--never!" said Adela,
firmly; and she drew closer to his side. Then Glyndon commenced his
story. That which, perhaps, in writing, and to minds prepared to
question and disbelieve, may seem cold and terrorless, became far
different when told by those blanched lips, with all that truth of
suffering which convinces and appalls. Much, indeed, he concealed,
much he involuntarily softened; but he revealed enough to make his
tale intelligible and distinct to his pale and trembling listener. "At
daybreak," he said, "I left that unhallowed and abhorred abode. I had
one hope still,--I would seek Mejnour through the world. I would force
him to lay at rest the fiend that haunted my soul. With this intent I
journeyed from city to city. I instituted the most vigilant researches
through the police of Italy. I even employed the services of the
Inquisition at Rome, which had lately asserted its ancient powers in the
trial of the less dangerous Cagliostro. All was in vain; not a trace of
him could be discovered. I was not alone, Adela." Here Glyndon paused a
moment, as if embarrassed; for in his recital, I need scarcely say that
he had only indistinctly alluded to Fillide, whom the reader may
surmise to be his companion. "I was not alone, but the associate of
my wanderings was not one in whom my soul could confide,--faithful and
affectionate, but without education, without faculties to comprehend me,
with natural instincts rather than cultivated reason; one in whom the
heart might lean in its careless hours, but with whom the mind could
have no commune, in whom the bewildered spirit could seek no guide. Yet
in the society of this person the demon troubled me not. Let me
explain yet more fully the dread conditions of its presence. In coarse
excitement, in commonplace life, in the wild riot, in the fierce excess,
in the torpid lethargy of that animal existence which we share with the
brutes, its eyes were invisible, its whisper