ad subsided into this determination, I suffered my
thoughts to dwell upon subjects less sternly agitating. Fondly did I
look forward to a meeting with Gerald, and a reconciliation of all our
early and most frivolous disputes. As an atonement for the injustice my
suspicions had done him, I resolved not to reclaim my inheritance.
My fortune was already ample; and all that I cared to possess of the
hereditary estates were the ruins of the old house and the copses of the
surrounding park: these Gerald would in all likelihood easily yield
to me; and with the natural sanguineness of my temperament, I already
planned the reconstruction of the ancient building, and the method of
that solitary life in which I resolved that the remainder of my years
should be spent.

Turning from this train of thought, I recurred to the mysterious and
sudden disappearance of Oswald: _that_ I was now easily able to account
for. There could be no doubt but that Montreuil had (immediately after
the murder), as he declared he would, induced Oswald to quit England,
and preserve silence, either by bribery or by threats. And when I
recalled the impression which the man had made upon me,--an impression
certainly not favourable to the elevation or the rigid honesty of his
mind,--I could not but imagine that one or the other of these means
Montreuil found far from difficult of success. The delirious fever into
which the wounds and the scene of that night had thrown me, and the
long interval that consequently elapsed before inquiry was directed to
Oswald, gave him every opportunity and indulgence in absenting himself
from the country, and it was not improbable that he had accompanied
Aubrey to Italy.

Here I paused, in deep acknowledgment of the truth of Aubrey's
assertion, that "under similar circumstances I might perhaps have been
equally guilty." My passions had indeed been "intense and fierce as his
own;" and there was a dread coincidence in the state of mind into which
each of us had been thrown by the event of that night, which made the
epoch of a desolated existence to both of us; if mine had been but
a passing delirium, and his a confirmed and lasting disease of the
intellect, the causes of our malady had been widely different. He had
been the criminal; I, only the sufferer.

Thus, as I leaned over the deck and the waves bore me homeward, after so
many years and vicissitudes, did the shadows of thought and memory flit
across me. How seemingly apa