very
unexpectedly to me, she seized and kissed--a proceeding deprecated
loathingly. "I assure you," I added, laughingly, "I would rather even
marry Englehart than continue here."

"Then you will marry Mr. Gregory?"

"I do not know--either that or die, I suppose--whichever God pleases. I
am weary of being a prisoner--weary of you, of every thing about me. All
that I cared for is lost to me, and I might as well surrender, I
suppose; not at discretion, however!"

She turned from me silently, and sought her couch again; but I felt
instinctively that she slept no more; and so we lay, silently watching
one another, until morning. I dared not renew my efforts to escape, at
all events, in the night-time, when I knew the house was locked, and
watched without, as well as within--for this was the old habit of the
square.

One--two--three--four o'clock came, and passed, and were reported by the
deep-tongued clock in the room beneath me, before I slept, and then I
dreamed a vision so vivid, that I wakened from it excited--exhausted--as
though its frightful figments had been stern realities.

I thought that the noble dog Ossian came to me again and laid the
double-footed key upon my lap, as he had done at Beauseincourt--staining
my white dress with blood, not mud, this time, and that Colonel La Vigne
struck it furiously to the floor, and handed me instead the wooden one I
had carved, with the words of the proverb:

"The opportunity lost is like the arrow sped: it comes no more. Your
wooden key will fail you next time, as it has failed you this, and you
will be baffled--baffled--as you tried to baffle me! Miriam, unseen I
pursue you!"

Then he laughed horribly, and faded in the gray dawn, to which I awoke,
covered with cold dew, and trembling in every limb. Had he been there,
indeed, in spiritual presence? Was it his hand that had left that band
about my brow--that surging in my brain--that weight upon my heart? O
God! had I indeed become the sport of fiends? At last I wept, and in my
tears found sullen comfort. The image so often caviled at as false in
_Hamlet_ came to me then as the readiest interpretation of what I
suffered, and thus proved its own fidelity and truth. "A sea of sorrow"
did indeed seem to roll above me, against which I felt the vanity of
"taking arms."

My destruction was decreed, and I had nothing to do but suffer and
submit!

All the persecution I had sustained since my father's death, at the
hands o