s unusually silent during dinner; but her
beauty was just that voluptuous beauty which is loveliest in repose. I
had never felt its influence so powerful over me as I felt it then.

In the drawing-room, Margaret's manner grew more familiar, more
confident towards me than it had ever been before. She spoke to me in
warmer tones, looked at me with warmer looks. A hundred little incidents
marked our wedding-evening--trifles that love treasures up--which still
remain in my memory. One among them, at least, will never depart from
it: I first kissed her on that evening.

Mr. Sherwin had gone out of the room; Mrs. Sherwin was at the other end
of it, watering some plants at the window; Margaret, by her father's
desire, was showing me some rare prints. She handed me a magnifying
glass, through which I was to look at a particular part of one of the
engravings, that was considered a master-piece of delicate workmanship.
Instead of applying the magnifying test to the print, for which I cared
nothing, I laughingly applied it to Margaret's face. Her lovely lustrous
black eye seemed to flash into mine through the glass; her warm, quick
breathing played on my cheek--it was but for an instant, and in that
instant I kissed her for the first time. What sensations the kiss gave
me then!--what remembrances it has left me now!

It was one more proof how tenderly, how purely I loved her, that, before
this time, I had feared to take the first love-privilege which I had
longed to assert, and might well have asserted, before. Men may not
understand this; women, I believe, will.

The hour of departure arrived; the inexorable hour which was to separate
me from my wife on my wedding evening. Shall I confess what I felt, on
the first performance of my ill-considered promise to Mr. Sherwin? No: I
kept this a secret from Margaret; I will keep it a secret here.

I took leave of her as hurriedly and abruptly as possible--I could not
trust myself to quit her in any other way. She had contrived to slip
aside into the darkest part of the room, so that I only saw her face
dimly at parting.

I went home at once. When I lay down to sleep--then the ordeal which I
had been unconsciously preparing for myself throughout the day, began
to try me. Every nerve in my body, strung up to the extremest point
of tension since the morning, now at last gave way. I felt my limbs
quivering, till the bed shook under me. I was possessed by a gloom and
horror, caused by n