andered stealthily to her cheek, and
beheld, flickering with the blaze of the wood fire, the spectral
hand that wrote mortality where he would fain have worshipped.
Georgiana soon learned to shudder at his gaze. It needed but a
glance with the peculiar expression that his face often wore to
change the roses of her cheek into a deathlike paleness, amid which
the crimson hand was brought strongly out, like a bas-relief of
ruby on the whitest marble.

Late one night, when the lights were growing dim so as hardly to
betray the stain on the poor wife's cheek, she herself, for the
first time, voluntarily took up the subject.

"Do you remember, my dear Aylmer," said she, with a feeble attempt
at a smile, "have you any recollection, of a dream last night about
this odious hand?"

"None! none whatever!" replied Aylmer, starting; but then he added,
in a dry, cold tone, affected for the sake of concealing the real
depth of his emotion, "I might well dream of it; for, before I
fell asleep, it had taken a pretty firm hold of my fancy."

"And you did dream of it?" continued Georgiana, hastily; for she
dreaded lest a gush of tears should interrupt what she had to say.
"A terrible dream! I wonder that you can forget it. Is it possible
to forget this one expression?--'It is in her heart now; we must
have it out!' Reflect, my husband; for by all means I would have
you recall that dream."

The mind is in a sad state when Sleep, the all-involving, cannot
confine her spectres within the dim region of her sway, but suffers
them to break forth affrighting this actual life with secrets that
perchance belong to a deeper one. Aylmer now remembered his dream.
He had fancied himself with his servant Aminadab attempting an
operation for the removal of the birthmark; but the deeper went
the knife, the deeper sank the hand, until at length its tiny grasp
appeared to have caught hold of Georgiana's heart; whence, however,
her husband was inexorably resolved to cut or wrench it away.

When the dream had shaped itself perfectly in his memory, Aylmer
sat in his wife's presence with a guilty feeling. Truth often finds
its way to the mind close muffled in robes of sleep, and then speaks
with uncompromising directness of matters in regard to which we
practise an unconscious self-deception during our waking moments.
Until now he had not been aware of the tyrannizing influence acquired
by one idea over his mind, and of the lengths which he might find