ich I had never known before, ran
through the dark confusion of my mind. I waited for a minute, till it
was likely that Montreuil had gained your chamber; I then pushed open
the door, and ascended the stairs. I met no one; the moonlight fell
around me, and its rays seemed to me like ghosts, pale and shrouded, and
gazing upon me with wan and lustreless eyes. I know not how I found your
chamber, but it was the only one I entered. I stood in the same room
with Isora and yourself: ye lay in sleep; Isora's face--O God! I know no
more--no more of that night of horror--save that I fled from the house
reeking with blood,--a murderer,--and the murderer of Isora!

Then came a long, long dream. I was in a sea of blood,--blood-red was
the sky, and one still, solitary star that gleamed far away with a
sickly and wan light was the only spot, above and around, which was not
of the same intolerable dye. And I thought my eyelids were cut off, as
those of the Roman consul are said to have been, and I had nothing to
shield my eyes from that crimson light, and the rolling waters of that
unnatural sea. And the red air burned through my eyes into my brain, and
then that also, methought, became blood; and all memory,--all images
of memory,--all idea,--wore a material shape and a material colour, and
were blood too. Everything was unutterably silent, except when my own
shrieks rang over the shoreless ocean, as I drifted on. At last I fixed
my eyes--the eyes which I might never close--upon that pale and single
star; and after I had gazed a little while, the star seemed to change
slowly--slowly--until it grew like the pale face of that murdered girl,
and then it vanished utterly, and _all_ was blood!

This vision was sometimes broken, sometimes varied by others, but it
always returned; and when at last I completely woke from it, I was in
Italy, in a convent. Montreuil had lost no time in removing me from
England. But once, shortly after my recovery, for I was mad for many
months, he visited me, and he saw what a wreck I had become. He pitied
me; and when I told him I longed above all things for liberty--for the
green earth and the fresh air, and a removal from that gloomy abode--he
opened the convent gates and blessed me, and bade me go forth. "All I
require of you," said he, "is a promise. If it be understood that you
live, you will be persecuted by inquiries and questions which will
terminate in a conviction of your crime: let it therefore be