but no
other thing had power over me. Her arms embraced another; but her
mock-embrace, the phantom of her love, still bound me, and I had not a
wish to escape. So I felt then, and so perhaps shall feel till I grow
old and die, nor have any desire that my years should last longer than
they are linked in the chain of those amorous folds, or than her
enchantments steep my soul in oblivion of all other things! I started
to find myself alone--for ever alone, without a creature to love me. I
looked round the room for help; I saw the tables, the chairs, the places
where she stood or sat, empty, deserted, dead. I could not stay where I
was; I had no one to go to but to the parent-mischief, the preternatural
hag, that had "drugged this posset" of her daughter's charms and
falsehood for me, and I went down and (such was my weakness and
helplessness) sat with her for an hour, and talked with her of her
daughter, and the sweet days we had passed together, and said I thought
her a good girl, and believed that if there was no rival, she still had
a regard for me at the bottom of her heart; and how I liked her all the
better for her coy, maiden airs: and I received the assurance over and
over that there was no one else; and that Sarah (they all knew) never
staid five minutes with any other lodger, while with me she would stay
by the hour together, in spite of all her father could say to her (what
were her motives, was best known to herself!) and while we were talking
of her, she came bounding into the room, smiling with smothered delight
at the consummation of my folly and her own art; and I asked her mother
whether she thought she looked as if she hated me, and I took her
wrinkled, withered, cadaverous, clammy hand at parting, and kissed it.
Faugh!--

I will make an end of this story; there is something in it discordant to
honest ears. I left the house the next day, and returned to Scotland in
a state so near to phrenzy, that I take it the shades sometimes ran into
one another. R---- met me the day after I arrived, and will tell you
the way I was in. I was like a person in a high fever; only mine was in
the mind instead of the body. It had the same irritating, uncomfortable
effect on the bye-standers. I was incapable of any application, and
don't know what I should have done, had it not been for the kindness of
----. I came to see you, to "bestow some of my tediousness upon you,"
but you were gone from home. Everything w