e in a manner unusually
paternal.

I smiled back with my lips, but at my heart there raged the blackest and
most unbridled terror. What if he failed? And oh, tenfold worse! what if
he succeeded? What detested and unnatural changeling would appear before
me to claim my hand? And could there, I asked myself with a dreadful
sinking, be any truth in his boasts of an assured victory over my
reluctance? I knew him, indeed, to be masterful, to lead my life at a
sign. Suppose, then, this experiment to succeed; suppose him to return
to me, hideously restored, like a vampire in a legend; and suppose that,
by some devilish fascination.... My head turned; all former fears
deserted me; and I felt I could embrace the worst in preference to this.

My mind was instantly made up. The doctor's presence in London was
justified by the affairs of the Mormon polity. Often, in our
conversation, he would gloat over the details of that great
organisation, which he feared even while yet he wielded it; and would
remind me that, even in the humming labyrinth of London, we were still
visible to that unsleeping eye in Utah. His visitors, indeed, who were
of every sort, from the missionary to the destroying angel, and seemed
to belong to every rank of life, had, up to that moment, filled me with
unmixed repulsion and alarm. I knew that if my secret were to reach the
ear of any leader my fate were sealed beyond redemption; and yet in my
present pass of horror and despair, it was to these very men that I
turned for help. I waylaid upon the stair one of the Mormon
missionaries, a man of a low class, but not inaccessible to pity; told
him I scarce remember what elaborate fable to explain my application;
and by his intermediacy entered into correspondence with my father's
family. They recognised my claim for help, and on this very day I was to
begin my escape.

Last night I sat up fully dressed, awaiting the result of the doctor's
labours, and prepared against the worst. The nights at this season and
in this northern latitude are short; and I had soon the company of the
returning daylight. The silence in and around the house was only broken
by the movements of the doctor in the laboratory; to these I listened,
watch in hand, awaiting the hour of my escape, and yet consumed by
anxiety about the strange experiment that was going forward overhead.
Indeed, now that I was conscious of some protection for myself, my
sympathies had turned more directly to the