own calamity on which I now looked, my position was reversed. Every
event of the doomed year of my probation was revived. But the doom
itself, the night-scene of horror through which I had passed, had
utterly vanished from my memory. This lost recollection, it was the one
unending toil of my wandering mind to recover, and I never got it back.
None who have not suffered as I suffered then, can imagine with what a
burning rage of determination I followed past events in my delirium, one
by one, for days and nights together,--followed, to get to the end which
I knew was beyond, but which I never could see, not even by glimpses,
for a moment at a time.

However my visions might alter in their course of succession, they
always began with the night when Mannion returned from the continent
to North Villa. I stood again in the drawing-room; I saw him enter; I
marked the slight confusion of Margaret; and instantly doubted her.
I noticed his unwillingness to meet her eye or mine; I looked on the
sinister stillness of his face; and suspected him. From that moment,
love vanished, and hatred came in its place. I began to watch; to garner
up slight circumstances which confirmed my suspicions; to wait craftily
for the day when I should discover, judge, and punish them both--the day
of disclosure and retribution that never came.

Sometimes, I was again with Mannion, in his house, on the night of the
storm. I detected in every word he spoke an artful lure to trap me into
trusting him as my second father, more than as my friend. I heard in
the tempest sounds which mysteriously interrupted, or mingled with, my
answers, voices supernaturally warning me of my enemy, each time that I
spoke to him. I saw once more the hideous smile of triumph on his face,
as I took leave of him on the doorstep: and saw it, this time, not as
an illusion produced by a flash of lightning, but as a frightful reality
which the lightning disclosed.

Sometimes, I was again in the garden at North Villa accidentally
overhearing the conversation between Margaret and her
mother--overhearing what deceit she was willing to commit, for the sake
of getting a new dress--then going into the room, and seeing her assume
her usual manner on meeting me, as if no such words as I had listened to
but the moment before, had ever proceeded from her lips. Or, I saw her
on that other morning, when, to revenge the death of her bird, she would
have killed with her own hand the one pet c