the poor, and he has gained respect, affection, and honourable
repute. He is safe in the security of silence and in the calm self-poise
of his adamantine will. His awful secret sleeps in his bosom and is at
rest forever. He has suffered much and he still suffers; yet, lulled
into a false security by the uneventful lapse of years and by that
drifting, desolate, apathetic recklessness which is sequent on the
subsiding storm of passionate sorrow, he has allowed himself to accept a
woman's love and to love her in return, and half to believe that his
long misery has expiated his sin and that even for him there may be a
little happiness yet possible on earth. Eugene Aram, the village
school-master, and Ruth Meadows, the vicar's daughter, are betrothed
lovers; and now, on the eve of their wedding morning, they stand
together among the roses, while the sun is going down and the sweet
summer wind plays softly in the leaves, and from the little gray church
close by a solemn strain of music--the vesper hymn--floats out upon the
stillness of the darkening day. The woman is all happiness, confidence,
and hope; the man, seared and blighted by conscious sin and subdued by
long years of patient submission to the sense of his own unworthiness,
is all gentleness, solicitude, reverence, and sorrow. At this supreme
moment, when now it seems that everything is surely well, the one man in
the world who knows Eugene Aram's secret has become, by seeming chance,
a guest in the vicarage; and even while Ruth places her hand upon her
lover's heart and softly whispers, "If guilt were there, it still should
be my pillow," the shadow of the gathering night that darkens around
them is deepened by the blacker shadow of impending doom. The first act
of the play is simply a picture. It involves no action. It only
introduces the several persons who are implicated in the experience to
be displayed, denotes their relationship to one another, and reveals a
condition of feeling and circumstance which is alike romantic, pathetic,
and perilous, and which is soon to be shattered by the disclosure of a
fatal secret. The act is a preparation for a catastrophe.

In the second act the opposed characters clash: the movement begins,
and the catastrophe is precipitated. The story opens at nightfall,
proceeds the same evening, and ends at the dawn of the ensuing day. The
scene of act second is a room in the vicarage. Aram and Parson Meadows
are playing chess, and Ruth i