awoke
refreshed and strengthened, as from a magnetic slumber.

At first, a sense of joy alone possessed me, but soon the great bitter
burden came rolling back upon my soul, like the stone of Sisyphus, which
my sleeping soul had heaved away.

It is a beautiful law of our being, that we rarely dream of that which
occupies and troubles us most in the daytime. Compensation is carried
out in this way, as in many others, insensibly, and the balance of
thought kept equal. I have heard persons complain frequently that they
could not dream of their dead, with whom their waking thoughts were ever
filled. But madness must have been the consequence, had there been no
repose for the mind from one engrossing image.

Relaxation comes to us in dreams at times when the brain needs it most,
and to lose the consciousness of a sorrow is to cast off its burden for
a time, and gain new strength to bear it.

I thought, when I first arose from my bed, that I would write to Claude
Bainrothe, and thus save myself the trial of an interview. But the
necessity of secrecy, in the commencement at least of the rupture, on
his own account, presented itself too forcibly to my mind to permit me
such self-indulgence. I felt assured in the first bitterness of feeling,
that he would lay my letters before Evelyn, from whom I especially
wished, for household peace, to preserve the knowledge of what had
passed in my chamber between herself and him.

I had no wish either to mortify or wound the man I had loved so
tenderly, but from whom I felt now wholly severed, as though the shadow
of a grave had intervened between us.

Never again, never, could he be more to me than a memory, a regret.

Glaring faults, impulsive offenses, _crime_ even it may be, I could have
forgiven, so long as his allegiance had been mine, and his affection
proof against change, but coldness, perfidy, loathing, such as he had
avowed, these could never be redeemed in any way, nor considered other
than they were, insuperable objections to our honorable union.

My heart recoiled from him so utterly, that I could conceive of no fate
more bitter than to be compelled again to receive his profession of
affection, his lover-like caresses; yet, in recoiling, it had been
bruised against its prison-bars, bruised and crushed like a bird that
seeks refuge in the farthest limits of its cage from an approaching foe,
and suffers almost as severely as if given to its fangs.

I determined, after m