his drugs. Her imagination, little less lively than his own, was awfully
impressed by the strange confessions she had heard,--by the ravings
of his delirium. Again and again had he shrieked forth, "It is
there,--there, by thy side, my sister!" He had transferred to her fancy
the spectre, and the horror that cursed himself. He perceived this, not
by her words, but her silence; by the eyes that strained into space; by
the shiver that came over her frame; by the start of terror; by the look
that did not dare to turn behind. Bitterly he repented his confession;
bitterly he felt that between his sufferings and human sympathy there
could be no gentle and holy commune; vainly he sought to retract,--to
undo what he had done, to declare all was but the chimera of an
overheated brain!

And brave and generous was this denial of himself; for, often and often,
as he thus spoke, he saw the Thing of Dread gliding to her side, and
glaring at him as he disowned its being. But what chilled him, if
possible, yet more than her wasting form and trembling nerves, was the
change in her love for him; a natural terror had replaced it. She turned
paler if he approached,--she shuddered if he took her hand. Divided from
the rest of earth, the gulf of the foul remembrance yawned now between
his sister and himself. He could endure no more the presence of the one
whose life HIS life had embittered. He made some excuses for departure,
and writhed to see that they were greeted eagerly. The first gleam of
joy he had detected since that fatal night, on Adela's face, he beheld
when he murmured "Farewell." He travelled for some weeks through the
wildest parts of Scotland; scenery which MAKES the artist, was loveless
to his haggard eyes. A letter recalled him to London on the wings of
new agony and fear; he arrived to find his sister in a condition both of
mind and health which exceeded his worst apprehensions.

Her vacant look, her lifeless posture, appalled him; it was as one who
gazed on the Medusa's head, and felt, without a struggle, the human
being gradually harden to the statue. It was not frenzy, it was not
idiocy,--it was an abstraction, an apathy, a sleep in waking. Only as
the night advanced towards the eleventh hour--the hour in which Glyndon
had concluded his tale--she grew visibly uneasy, anxious, and perturbed.
Then her lips muttered; her hands writhed; she looked round with a look
of unspeakable appeal for succour, for protection, and sudde