CHAPTER II.

The night that followed this conversation was to me a most
uncomfortable one. The episode in the day's occurrences had made so
deep an impression on me, that it excluded all other thoughts from my
mind, which it occupied so intently, that, upon retiring to my
chamber, several hours elapsed before I sought repose. I did so at
last, but in vain. Between the fever attendant upon my indisposition,
and the irksomeness of frame caused by mental inquietude, sleep was
completely banished from my eyelids, or visited them only in short and
broken slumbers, peopled by the distorted images of my waking
thoughts. The mysterious Pair were again before me. I saw them gliding
through the long street, the man hastening on in that attitude, so
strikingly described by Coleridge, like one

"Who walks in fear and dread;
And having once turn'd round, walks on,
And turns no more his head,
Because he knows a frightful fiend
Doth close behind him tread"--

the woman keeping on his track with the constancy of Doom. Or I was
standing a witness to their first meeting in the grim Dark on that
lonely road, their eyes of hate and fear staring wildly into each
other. Sometimes I found myself spellbound between the two, the centre
upon which their fearful sympathies revolved, the object upon which
their long pent-up passions were about to burst. Starting from those
visions, my waking fancies were hardly less tormenting. I was just at
that season of youth, before the calmer and nobler faculties have
acquired maturity and tone; when incidents that vary but little from
the ordinary economy of life, seen through the medium of the
imagination, assume a magnitude of distinctness not properly their
own. On the present occasion, however, my friend's recital was well
calculated to arouse the speculations of a romantic fancy; and mine
was now fully employed in forming a thousand conjectures in
elucidation of the curious circumstances he had repeated to me. What
could be the relation between those strange parties? Was it attachment
in the one and aversion in the other? Or had one, as was commonly
supposed, been the plundered victim--the other the Despoiler? Neither
of these cases could be so. A petty office of police would have
relieved the persecuted--a court of law would have redressed the
robbery. _Monomania_ had been known to instigate persons to a line of
conduct as perseveringly painful as this woman pursued; but then the