I have dined, dearest: I want nothing; eat, love, eat." But he ate not.
The food robbed from her seemed to him more deadly than poison; and
he would rise, and dash his hand to his brow, and go forth alone, with
nature unsatisfied, to look upon this luxurious world and learn content.

It was after such a scene that, one day, he wandered forth into the
streets, desperate and confused in mind, and fainting with hunger, and
half insane with fiery and wrong thoughts, which dashed over his barren
and gloomy soul, and desolated, but conquered not! It was evening: he
stood (for he had strode on so rapidly, at first, that his strength was
now exhausted, and he was forced to pause) leaning against the railed
area of a house in a lone and unfrequented street. No passenger shared
this dull and obscure thoroughfare. He stood, literally, in scene as in
heart, solitary amidst the great city, and wherever he looked, lo, there
were none!

"Two days," said he, slowly and faintly, "two days, and bread has only
once passed my lips; and that was snatched from her,--from those lips
which I have fed with sweet and holy kisses, and whence my sole comfort
in this weary life has been drawn. And she,--ay, she starves,--and my
child too. They complain not; they murmur not: but they lift up
their eyes to me and ask for--Merciful God! Thou didst make man in
benevolence; Thou dost survey this world with a pitying and paternal
eye: save, comfort, cherish them, and crush me if Thou wilt!"

At that moment a man darted suddenly from an obscure alley, and passed
Glendower at full speed; presently came a cry, and a shout, and a rapid
trampling of feet, and, in another moment, an eager and breathless crowd
rushed upon the solitude of the street.

"Where is he?" cried a hundred voices to Glendower,--"where,--which road
did the robber take?" But Glendower could not answer: his nerves were
unstrung, and his dizzy brain swam and reeled; and the faces which
peered upon him, and the voices which shrieked and yelled in his ear,
were to him as the forms and sounds of a ghastly and phantasmal world.
His head drooped upon his bosom; he clung to the area for support: the
crowd passed on; they were in pursuit of guilt; they were thirsting
after blood; they were going to fill the dungeon and feed the gibbet;
what to them was the virtue they could have supported, or the famine
they could have relieved? But they knew not his distress, nor the extent
of his weakness, or