r, that all will be done
that the utmost zeal can suggest."

"They have killed him! they have killed him!" she said, mournfully. "Oh,
God, they have killed him! I am not now mad, but the time will come when
I must surely be maddened. The vampyre has killed Charles Holland--the
dreadful vampyre!"

"Nay, now, Flora, this is frenzy."

"Because he loved me has he been destroyed. I know it, I know it. The
vampyre has doomed me to destruction. I am lost, and all who loved me
will be involved in one common ruin on my account. Leave me all of you
to perish. If, for iniquities done in our family, some one must suffer
to appease the divine vengeance, let that one be me, and only me."

"Hush, sister, hush!" cried Henry. "I expected not this from you. The
expressions you use are not your expressions. I know you better. There
is abundance of divine mercy, but no divine vengeance. Be calm, I pray
you."

"Calm! calm!"

"Yes. Make an exertion of that intellect we all know you to possess. It
is too common a thing with human nature, when misfortune overtakes it,
to imagine that such a state of things is specially arranged. We quarrel
with Providence because it does not interfere with some special miracle
in our favour; forgetting that, being denizens of this earth, and
members of a great social system; We must be subject occasionally to the
accidents which will disturb its efficient working."

"Oh, brother, brother!" she exclaimed, as she dropped into a seat, "you
have never loved."

"Indeed!"

"No; you have never felt what it was to hold your being upon the breath
of another. You can reason calmly, because you cannot know the extent of
feeling you are vainly endeavouring to combat."

"Flora, you do me less than justice. All I wish to impress upon your
mind is, that you are not in any way picked out by Providence to be
specially unhappy--that there is no perversion of nature on your
account."

"Call you that hideous vampyre form that haunts me no perversion of
ordinary nature?"

"What is is natural," said Marchdale.

"Cold reasoning to one who suffers as I suffer. I cannot argue with you;
I can only know that I am most unhappy--most miserable."

"But that will pass away, sister, and the sun of your happiness may
smile again."

"Oh, if I could but hope!"

"And wherefore should you deprive yourself of that poorest privilege of
the most unhappy?"

"Because my heart tells me to despair."

"Tell it you won't, then,"