night stayed. Fever set its hurried pulses fleeting
like wild-fire through every vein; a band of hot iron pressed above my
eyes;--but these were adjuncts; the curse consumed me within. In every
moment I heard those calm and fatal words, "I do not love you," sounding
clear and sweet through the dull leaden air of night,--an air full of
ghostly sounds, sighs about the casements, creaking stairs, taps at
the window, light sounds of feet in the long hall below; all falling
heedless on my ear, for my ghost walked and talked with me, a ghastly
reality, the galvanized corpse of a murdered life.

Still the night stayed. A weight of lead pressed on my brain and
concentrated it to frantic power; the months in which I had known her,
the only months I could call life, came back to me inch by inch, grain
by grain. I recalled our first meeting,--the sudden springing into
acquaintance,--the sympathetic power that had transfused those cold blue
eyes into depths of tenderness and pity,--the gay and genial manner that
aroused and charmed me,--the scornful lip that curled at the world for
its worldliness,--that fresh imagination, which, like the spirit of
frost, decked the commonest things with beauty; and I recalled those
early letters that had passed between us,--mine, insipid enough,--hers,
piquant, graphic, refined, tender, delicately passionate, sparkling,
full of lofty thought and profound feeling. Good God! could she not
have taken my heart, and wrung it, and thrown it away, under some more
commonplace pretext than the profaned name of Friendship? Her friend!
It is true I had called myself her friend; I had been strenuous in the
nomenclature to quiet my own conscience,--to satisfy her conventional
scruples; but had she no instinct to interpret the pretence? What friend
ever lived on every look, studied every phrase, watched every action and
expression, was so torn with jealousy and racked with doubt, bore
so humbly with caprices, and forgave every offence so instantly and
utterly,--nay, was scarce conscious that anything her soul entertained
could be an offence, could be wrong? Friendship!--ah, that deity is calm
and serene; that firm lip and pale cheek do not flush with apprehension
or quiver with passion; that tranquil eye does not shine with anything
but quiet tears. Rather call the dusky and dark-haired Twilight, whose
pensive face is limned against the western hills, by the name of that
fierce and fervid Noon that stands erect