heavy trance of mental pain.

I dare not describe what remembrances of the guilty woman who had
deceived and ruined me, now gnawed unceasingly and poisonously at my
heart. My bodily strength feebly revived; but my mental energies
never showed a sign of recovering with them. My father's considerate
forbearance, Clara's sorrowful reserve in touching on the subject of my
long illness, or of the wild words which had escaped me in my delirium,
mutely and gently warned me that the time was come when I owed the tardy
atonement of confession to the family that I had disgraced; and still,
I had no courage to speak, no resolution to endure. The great misery
of the past, shut out from me the present and the future alike--every
active power of my mind seemed to be destroyed hopelessly and for ever.

There were moments--most often at the early morning hours, while
the heaviness of the night's sleep still hung over me in my
wakefulness--when I could hardly realise the calamity which had
overwhelmed me; when it seemed that I must have dreamt, during the
night, of scenes of crime and woe and heavy trial which had never
actually taken place. What was the secret of the terrible influence
which--let her even be the vilest of the vile--Mannion must have
possessed over Margaret Sherwin, to induce her to sacrifice me to him?
Even the crime itself was not more hideous and more incredible than the
mystery in which its evil motives, and the manner of its evil ripening,
were still impenetrably veiled.

Mannion! It was a strange result of the mental malady under which I
suffered, that, though the thought of Mannion was now inextricably
connected with every thought of Margaret, I never once asked myself, or
had an idea of asking myself, for days together, after my convalescence,
what had been the issue of our struggle, for him. In the despair of
first awakening to a perfect sense of the calamity which had been
hurled on me from the hand of my wife--in the misery of first clearly
connecting together, after the wanderings of delirium, the Margaret to
whom with my hand I had given all my heart, with the Margaret who had
trampled on the gift and ruined the giver--all minor thoughts and
minor feelings, all motives of revengeful curiosity or of personal
apprehension were suppressed. And yet, the time was soon to arrive when
that lost thought of inquiry into Mannion's fate, was to become the
one master-thought that possessed me--the thought that gave