hdog, or the low of
distant cattle. All else was mute save when the deep sepulchral tones of
that man, if man he was, gave an impulse to the soft air around him.

With a strolling movement as if he were careless if he proceeded in that
direction or not, he still went onward toward the house, and now he
stood by that little summer-house once so sweet and so dear a retreat,
in which the heart-stricken Flora had held her interview with him whom
she loved with a devotion unknown to meaner minds.

This spot scarcely commanded any view of the house, for so enclosed was
it among evergreens and blooming flowers, that it seemed like a very
wilderness of nature, upon which, with liberal hand, she had showered
down in wild luxuriance her wildest floral beauties.

In and around that spot the night air was loaded with sweets. The
mingled perfume of many flowers made that place seem a very paradise.
But oh, how sadly at variance with that beauty and contentedness of
nature was he who stood amidst such beauty! All incapable as he was of
appreciating its tenderness, or of gathering the faintest moral from its
glory.

"Why am I here?" he said. "Here, without fixed design or stability of
purpose, like some miser who has hidden his own hoards so deeply within
the bowels of the earth he cannot hope that he shall ever again be able
to bring them to the light of day. I hover around this spot which I
feel--which I know--contains my treasure, though I cannot lay my hands
upon it, or exult in its glistening beauty."

Even as he spoke he cowered down like some guilty thing, for he heard a
faint footstep upon the garden path. So light, so fragile was the step,
that, in the light of day, the very hum of summer insects would have
drowned the noise; but he heard it, that man of crime--of unholy and
awful impulses. He heard it, and he shrunk down among the shrubs and
flowers till he was hidden completely from observation amid a world of
fragrant essences.

Was it some one stealthily in that place even as he was, unwelcome or
unknown? or was it one who had observed him intrude upon the privacy of
those now unhappy precincts, and who was coming to deal upon him that
death which, vampyre though he might be, he was yet susceptible of from
mortal hands?

The footstep advanced, and lower down he shrunk until his coward-heart
beat against the very earth itself. He knew that he was unarmed, a
circumstance rare with him, and only to be accounted for b