in their strong
excitement. So it would have seemed to a less suspicious observer; but I
thought that I could detect the overacting of pretence. I may have
done her wrong; but the impression still remains. At the funeral, this
extravagant role of grief was re-enacted, and the impression was left on
many minds that she was half mad with grief.

Occasionally, after this event, I was summoned to the Allen House to see
its unhappy mistress. I say unhappy, for no human being ever had a face
written all over with the characters you might read in hers, that was
not miserable. I used to study it, sometimes, to see if I could get
anything like a true revelation of her inner life. The sudden lighting
up of her countenance at times, as you observed its rapidly varying
expression, made you almost shudder, for the gleam which shot across it
looked like a reflection from hell. I know no other word to express what
I mean. Remorse, at times, I could plainly read.

One thing I soon noticed; the room in which Captain Allen died--the
north-west chamber before mentioned--remained shut up; and an old
servant told me, years afterwards, that Mrs. Allen had never been inside
of it since the fatal day on which I attended him in his last moments.

At the time when this story opens the old lady was verging on to sixty.
The five years which had passed since she was left alone had bent her
form considerably, and the diseased state of mind which I noticed when
first called in to visit the family as a physician, was now but a
little way removed from insanity. She was haunted by many strange
hallucinations; and the old servant above alluded to, informed me, that
she was required to sleep in the room with her mistress, as she never
would be alone after dark. Often, through the night, she would start up
in terror, her diseased imagination building up terrible phantoms in the
land of dreams, alarming the house with her cries.

I rarely visited her that I did not see new evidences of waning reason.
In the beginning I was fearful that she might do some violence to
herself or her servants, but her insanity began to assume a less
excitable form; and at last she sank into a condition of torpor, both of
mind and body, from which I saw little prospect of her ever rising.

"It is well," I said to myself. "Life had better wane slowly away than
to go out in lurid gleams like the flashes of a dying volcano."

CHAPTER V.

And now, reader, after this l