rdly bear, for downright agony,
to look into her face, for he was stricken with the conviction that she
was fated to die.

"Oh, Cathy, how can I bear it?" was the first sentence he uttered.

"You and Edgar have broken my heart, Heathcliff," was her reply. "You
have killed me and thriven on it, I think."

"Are you possessed with a devil," he asked, "to talk in that manner to
me when you are dying? You know you lie to say I have killed you, and
you know that I could as soon forget my existence as forget you. Is it
not sufficient that while you are at peace, I shall be in the torments
of hell?"

"I shall not be at peace," moaned Catherine.

"Why did you despise me? Why did you betray your own heart? You loved
me. What right had you to leave me?"

"Let me alone!" sobbed Catherine. "I've done wrong, and I'm dying for
it! Forgive me!"

That night was born the Catherine you, Mr. Lockwood, saw at the Heights,
and her mother's spirit was at home with God.

When in the morning I told Heathcliff, who had been watching near all
night, he dashed his head against the knotted trunk of the tree by which
he stood and howled, not like a man, but like a savage beast, as he
besought her ghost to haunt him. "Be with me always--take any form!" he
cried. "Only do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you!"

Life with Heathcliff becoming impossible to Isabella, she left the
neighbourhood, never to revisit it, and lived near London; and there her
son, whom she christened Linton, was born a few months after her escape.
He was an ailing, peevish creature. When Linton was twelve, or a little
more, and Catherine thirteen, Isabella died, and the boy was brought to
Thrushcross Grange. Hindley Earnshaw drank himself to death about the
same time, after mortgaging every yard of his land for cash; and
Heathcliff was the mortgagee. So Hareton Earnshaw, who should have been
the first gentleman in the neighbourhood, was reduced to dependence on
his father's enemy, in whose house he lived, ignorant that he had been
wronged.

The motives of Heathcliff now became clear. Under the influence of a
passionate but calculating revenge, allied with greed, he was planning
the destruction of the Earnshaw family, and the union of the Wuthering
Heights and Thrushcross Grange estates. To this end, having brought his
weakly son home to the Heights and terrorised him into a pitiable
slavery, he schemed a marriage between him and young Catherine Linton,