ble to the sufferer when he had his fair young
niece's company. And now?

At night, after long lying awake, when she woke from a snatch of uneasy
sleep, she involuntarily listened for the faint panting breath, but no
heart now throbbed by her side; and when she quitted her lonely couch at
dawn the coming day lay before her as a desert and treeless solitude. By
night, as by day, she constantly tried to call up the image of the dead,
but whenever her small imaginative power had succeeded in doing so--not
unfrequently at first--she had seen him as in the last moments of his
life, a curse on his only son on his trembling lips. This horrible
impression deprived her of the last consolation of the mourner: a
beautiful memory, while it destroyed her proud and glad satisfaction in
her only child. The youth, who had till now been her soul's idol, was
stigmatized and branded in her eyes. She might not ignore the burden laid
on Orion by that most just man; instead of taking him to her heart with
double tenderness and softening or healing the fearful punishment
inflicted by his father, she could only pity him. When Orion came to see
her she would stroke his waving hair and, as she desired not to wound him
and make him even more unhappy than he must be already, she neither
blamed nor admonished him, and never reminded him of his father's curse.
And how beggared was that frugal heart, accustomed to spend all its store
of love on so few objects--nay, chiefly on one alone who was now no more!

The happy voices of the children had always given her pleasure, so long
as they did not disturb her suffering husband; now, they too were silent.
She had withdrawn the sunshine of her narrow affection from her only
grandchild, who had hitherto held a place in it, for little Mary had had
a share in the horrors that had come upon her and Orion in her husband's
last moments. Indeed, the bereaved woman's excited fancy had firmly
conceived the mad notion that the child was the evil genius of the house
and the tool of Satan.

Neforis had, however, enjoyed some hours of greater ease during the last
two days. In the misery of wakefulness which was beginning to torture her
like an acute pain, she had suddenly recollected what relief from
sleeplessness her husband had been wont to find in the opium pillules,
and a box of the medicine, only just opened, was at hand. And was not
she, too, suffering unutterable wretchedness? Why should she neglect the
remedy