ook around; all
is loneliness and desert! This house and your brother's are solitary and
dismantled! You die away at the sight of me! My fear whispers that some
deed of horror has been perpetrated; that I am the undesigning cause."

What language was this? Had he not avowed himself a ravisher? Had not
this chamber witnessed his atrocious purposes? I besought him with new
vehemence to go.

He lifted his eyes--"Great heaven! what have I done? I think I know
the extent of my offences. I have acted, but my actions have possibly
effected more than I designed. This fear has brought me back from my
retreat. I come to repair the evil of which my rashness was the cause,
and to prevent more evil. I come to confess my errors."

"Wretch!" I cried when my suffocating emotions would permit me to speak,
"the ghosts of my sister and her children, do they not rise to accuse
thee? Who was it that blasted the intellects of Wieland? Who was it
that urged him to fury, and guided him to murder? Who, but thou and the
devil, with whom thou art confederated?"

At these words a new spirit pervaded his countenance. His eyes once more
appealed to heaven. "If I have memory, if I have being, I am innocent. I
intended no ill; but my folly, indirectly and remotely, may have caused
it; but what words are these! Your brother lunatic! His children dead!"

What should I infer from this deportment? Was the ignorance which these
words implied real or pretended?--Yet how could I imagine a mere human
agency in these events? But if the influence was preternatural or
maniacal in my brother's case, they must be equally so in my own. Then
I remembered that the voice exerted, was to save me from Carwin's
attempts. These ideas tended to abate my abhorrence of this man, and to
detect the absurdity of my accusations.

"Alas!" said I, "I have no one to accuse. Leave me to my fate. Fly from
a scene stained with cruelty; devoted to despair."

Carwin stood for a time musing and mournful. At length he said, "What
has happened? I came to expiate my crimes: let me know them in their
full extent. I have horrible forebodings! What has happened?"

I was silent; but recollecting the intimation given by this man when he
was detected in my closet, which implied some knowledge of that power
which interfered in my favor, I eagerly inquired, "What was that voice
which called upon me to hold when I attempted to open the closet? What
face was that which I saw at the bottom of