under the hot zenith, instinct
with the red blood of a thousand summers, casting her glittering tresses
abroad upon the south-wind, and holding in her hands the all-unfolded
rose of life. And if I was only her friend, was that a reason why she
should permit in me the thousand intimacies of look and caress that are
the novitiate of love? Was it a friend's calm duty to give me her tiny
hand to hold in mine, that I might fold and unfold the rosy fingers, and
explore the white dimples that were its ornamenting gems,--to rest her
tired head against my shoulder, even,--watching all day by the chair
where pain, life-long ministrant, held me on the rack?--was it only
friendly that she should press her soft little mouth to mine, and soothe
me into quiet as a mother soothes her last, her dearest child? No! no!
no! never could that be! She knew, she had known, that I loved her!
Deliberate cruelty outlined those lovely lips; every statue-like
moulding of that proud face told the hard and unrelenting nature of the
soul within. God forgive her!--the exclamation escaped me unaware, and
recoiled in a savage exultation that such treachery had no forgiveness
in heaven or on earth,--one gleam of desperate satisfaction in that
black night. But in its light, what new madness seized me? I had held
her stainless and holy, intact of evil or deceit; what was she now? My
whole brain reeled; the foundations were taken away; earth and heaven
met; even as when the West forges tempest and lightning-bolts upon its
melancholy hills, brooding and muttering hour by hour, till at length
the livid gloom rushes upward against sun and stars, and the blackening
sky shuts down upon the blackened earth, cowering at the shock, and the
torrents and flames are let loose upon their prey,--so an accumulated
storm of unutterable agony flung wave on wave above me, wrecked and
alone.

Still the night stayed; the black mass of forest that swept up the
hill-side stood in mystical gloom, in silence that could be felt; when
at once,--not suddenly,--as if the night could forbear no more, but
must utter some chord with the culmination of midnight horrors, a bird
uttered one sharp cry, desolate utterly, hopeless, concentred, as if a
keen blade parted its heart and the outraged life within remonstrated
and despaired,--despaired not of life, for still the note repeated its
monotone, but of death, of period to its pangs. That cry entered into my
brain; it was unjust of Nature