e vulture fated to
live and prey within it forever! Thrice did I resolve to confide in you,
as we then sat together, and thrice did my evil genius forbid it. You
seemed, even in your affection to me, so wholly engrossed with your own
hopes; you seemed so little to regret leaving me; you stung, so often
and so deeply, in our short conference, that feeling which made
me desire to monopolize all things in those I loved, that I said
inly,--"Why should I bare my heart to one who can so little understand
it?" And so we turned home, and you dreamed not of that which was then
within me, and which was destined to be your curse and mine.

Not many weeks previous to that night, I had seen one whom to see was to
love! Love!--I tell you, Morton, that _that_ word is expressive of soft
and fond emotion, and there should be another expressive of all that is
fierce and dark and unrelenting in the human heart!--all that seems most
like the deadliest and the blackest hate, and yet is not hate! I
saw this being, and from that moment my real nature, which had slept
hitherto, awoke! I remember well it was one evening in the beginning of
summer that I first saw her. She sat alore in the little garden beside
the cottage door, and I paused, and, unseen, looked over the slight
fence that separated us, and fed my eyes with a loveliness that I
thought till then only twilight or the stars could wear! From that
evening I came, night after night, to watch her from the same spot; and
every time I beheld her the poison entered deeper and deeper into
my system. At length I had an opportunity of being known to her, of
speaking to her, of hearing her speak, of touching the ground she had
hallowed, of entering the home where she dwelt!

I must explain: I said that both Gerald and myself corresponded
privately with Montreuil; we were both bound over to secrecy with regard
to you; and this, my temper and Gerald's coolness with you rendered an
easy obligation to both;--I say my temper, for I loved to think I had
a secret not known to another; and I carried this reserve even to
the degree of concealing from Gerald himself the greater part of the
correspondence between me and the Abbe. In his correspondence with each
of us, Montreuil acted with his usual skill; to Gerald, as the elder in
years, the more prone to enterprise, and the manlier in aspect and in
character, was allotted whatever object was of real trust or importance.
Gerald it was who, under pretenc