e weak; but I did what I could," replied the youth in a
smothered tone. "There stands a noble tombstone above his head; and I
would to Heaven I slept as soundly as he!"

Dorcas, perceiving the wildness of his latter words, inquired no
further at the time; but her heart found ease in the thought that Roger
Malvin had not lacked such funeral rites as it was possible to bestow.
The tale of Reuben's courage and fidelity lost nothing when she
communicated it to her friends; and the poor youth, tottering from his
sick chamber to breathe the sunny air, experienced from every tongue
the miserable and humiliating torture of unmerited praise. All
acknowledged that he might worthily demand the hand of the fair maiden
to whose father he had been "faithful unto death;" and, as my tale is
not of love, it shall suffice to say that in the space of a few months
Reuben became the husband of Dorcas Malvin. During the marriage
ceremony the bride was covered with blushes, but the bridegroom's face
was pale.

There was now in the breast of Reuben Bourne an incommunicable
thought--something which he was to conceal most heedfully from her whom
he most loved and trusted. He regretted, deeply and bitterly, the moral
cowardice that had restrained his words when he was about to disclose
the truth to Dorcas; but pride, the fear of losing her affection, the
dread of universal scorn, forbade him to rectify this falsehood. He
felt that for leaving Roger Malvin he deserved no censure. His
presence, the gratuitous sacrifice of his own life, would have added
only another and a needless agony to the last moments of the dying man;
but concealment had imparted to a justifiable act much of the secret
effect of guilt; and Reuben, while reason told him that he had done
right, experienced in no small degree the mental horrors which punish
the perpetrator of undiscovered crime. By a certain association of
ideas, he at times almost imagined himself a murderer. For years, also,
a thought would occasionally recur, which, though he perceived all its
folly and extravagance, he had not power to banish from his mind. It
was a haunting and torturing fancy that his father-in-law was yet
sitting at the foot of the rock, on the withered forest leaves, alive,
and awaiting his pledged assistance. These mental deceptions, however,
came and went, nor did he ever mistake them for realities: but in the
calmest and clearest moods of his mind he was conscious that he had a
deep