but unable to speak.

With the aid of my two companions I got him home, and he was ill for
several weeks before he died. During his illness he told me all he had
to tell; and though Paul and his family disappeared next day,--perhaps
going on board the Nantucket brig, which had narrowly escaped
shipwreck,--I afterwards learned all the remaining facts from the only
neighbor in whom they had placed confidence. Severance, while
convalescing at a country-house in Fayal, had fallen passionately in
love with a young peasant-girl, who had broken off her intended
marriage for love of him, and had sunk into a half-imbecile melancholy
when deserted. She had afterwards come to this country, and joined her
sister, Paul's wife. Paul had received her reluctantly, and only on
condition that her existence should be concealed. This was the easier,
as it was one of her whims to go out only by night, when she had
haunted the great house, which, she said, reminded her of her own
island, so that she liked to wear thither the capote which had been the
pride of her heart at home. On the few occasions when she had caught a
glimpse of Severance, he had seemed to her, no doubt, as much a phantom
as she seemed to him. On the night of the storm, they had both sought
their favorite haunt, unconscious of each other, and the friends of
each had followed in alarm.

I got traces of the family afterwards at Nantucket and later at
Narragansett, and had reason to think that Paul was employed, one
summer, by a farmer on Conanicut; but I was always just too late for
them; and the money which Severance left, as his only reparation for
poor Emilia, never was paid. The affair was hushed up, and very few,
even among the neighbors, knew the tragedy that had passed by them with
the storm.

After Severance died, I had that temporary feeling of weakened life
which remains after the first friend or the first love passes, and the
heart seems to lose its sense of infinity. His father came, and prosed,
and measured the windows of the empty house, and calculated angles of
reflection, and poured even death and despair into his crucible of
commonplace; the mother whined in her feebler way at home; while the
only brother, a talkative medical student, tried to pooh-pooh it all,
and sent me a letter demonstrating that Emilia was never in America,
and that the whole was an hallucination. I cared nothing for his
theory; it all seemed like a dream to me, and, as all the acto