nd I sprang up and looked wildly round me. Where was I?
Who was I?

Were the heavens turned to brass and the sun to blood, or was yon
saffron belt the gold of declining day,--yon crimson globe, the sun
rolling through a hazy, sultry atmosphere? What meant that long green
mound stretching at my side, that broken shaft, twined with the cypress
vine? I clasped both hands over my temples, as these questions drifted
through my mind, then bending my knees, I sunk lower and lower, till my
head rested on the grave. I was conscious of but one wish--to stay there
and die. The bolt of indelible disgrace quivered in my heart; why should
I wish to live?

CHAPTER XXV.

I did not become insensible, but I was dead to surrounding objects, dead
to the present, dead to the future. The past, the terrible, the
inexorable past, was upon me, trampling me, grinding me with iron heel,
into the dust of the grave. I could not move, for its nightmare weight
crushed me. I could not see, for its blackness shrouded me; nor hear,
for its shrieks deafened me. Had I remained long in that awful
condition, I should have become a maniac.

"Gabriella!" said a voice, which at any other moment would have wakened
a thrill of rapture, "Gabriella, speak,--look up. Why do you do this?
Why will you not speak? Do you not hear me?"

I did try to speak, but my tongue seemed frozen. I did try to lift my
head, but in vain.

Ernest Linwood, for it was he, knelt down by me, and putting his arms
round me, raised me from the ground, without any volition of my own. I
know not what state I was in. I was perfectly conscious; but had no more
power over the movement of a muscle than if I were dead. My eyes were
closed, and my head drooped on his breast, as he raised me, bowed by its
own weight. I was in a kind of conscious catalepsy. He was alarmed,
terrified. As he afterwards told me, he really believed me dead, and
clasping me to him with an energy of which he was not aware, adjured me
in the most tender and passionate manner to speak and tell him that I
lived.

"Gabriella, my flower-girl, my darling!" he cried, pressing my cheek
with those pure, despairing kisses with which love hallows death. Had I
indeed passed the boundaries of life, for my spirit alone was conscious
of caresses, whose remembrance thrilled through my being.

The reaction was instantaneous. The chilled blood grew warm and rushed
through every vein with wild rapidity. Then I became physica