ke languid and exhausted. All the occurrences
of the preceding day had passed away from her mind, as though they had
been the mere illusions of her fancy. She rose melancholy and
abstracted, and, as she dressed herself, was heard to sing one of her
plaintive ballads. When she entered the parlour, her eyes were swoln
with weeping. She heard Eugene's voice without, and started. She
passed her hand across her forehead, and stood musing, like one
endeavouring to recall a dream. Eugene entered the room, and advanced
towards her; she looked at him with an eager, searching look, murmured
some indistinct words, and before he could reach her, sank upon the
floor.

She relapsed into a wild and unsettled state of mind; but now that the
first shock was over, the physician ordered that Eugene should keep
continually in her sight. Sometimes she did not know him; at other
times she would talk to him as if he were going to sea, and would
implore him not to part from her in anger; and when he was not
present, she would speak of him as if buried in the ocean, and would
sit, with clasped hands, looking upon the ground, the picture of
despair. As the agitation of her feelings subsided, and her frame
recovered from the shock which it had received, she became more placid
and coherent. Eugene kept almost continually near her. He formed the
real object round which her scattered ideas once more gathered, and
which linked them once more with the realities of life. But her
changeful disorder now appeared to take a new turn. She became languid
and inert, and would sit for hours silent, and almost in a state of
lethargy. If roused from this stupor, it seemed as if her mind would
make some attempts to follow up a train of thought, but would soon
become confused. She would regard every one that approached her with
an anxious and inquiring eye, that seemed continually to disappoint
itself. Sometimes, as her lover sat holding her hand, she would look
pensively in his face without saying a word, until his heart was
overcome; and after these transient fits of intellectual exertion, she
would sink again into lethargy.

By degrees, this stupor increased; her mind appeared to have subsided
into a stagnant and almost death-like calm. For the greater part of
the time, her eyes were closed; her face almost as fixed and
passionless as that of a corpse. She no longer took any notice of
surrounding objects. There was an awfulness in this tranquillity, that
fil