be dead!"

He uttered this jest with a faint weary echo of his old merry, melodious
laugh, then turned his face to the wall; and so I left him to repose.

CHAPTER LXXV.

I found Mrs. Ashleigh waiting for me in our usual sitting-room. She
was in tears. She had begun to despond of Lilian's recovery, and she
infected me with her own alarm. However, I disguised my participation in
her fears, soothed and sustained her as I best could, and persuaded her
to retire to rest. I saw Faber for a few minutes before I sought my
own chamber. He assured me that there was no perceptible change for the
worse in Lilian's physical state since he had last seen me, and that her
mind, even within the last few hours, had become decidedly more clear.
He thought that, within the next twenty-four hours, the reason would
make a strong and successful effort for complete recovery; but he
declined to hazard more than a hope that the effort would not exhaust
the enfeebled powers of the frame. He himself was so in need of a few
hours of rest that I ceased to harass him with questions which he could
not answer, and fears which he could not appease. Before leaving him
for the night, I told him briefly that there was a traveller in my but
smitten by a disease which seemed to me so grave that I would ask
his opinion of the case, if he could accompany me to the but the next
morning.

My own thoughts that night were not such as would suffer me to sleep.

Before Margrave's melancholy state much of my former fear and abhorrence
faded away. This being, so exceptional that fancy might well invest him
with preternatural attributes, was now reduced by human suffering to
human sympathy and comprehension; yet his utter want of conscience was
still as apparent as in his day of joyous animal spirits. With what
hideous candour he had related his perfidy and ingratitude to the man
to whom, in his belief, he owed an inestimable obligation, and with what
insensibility to the signal retribution which in most natures would have
awakened remorse!

And by what dark hints and confessions did he seem to confirm the
incredible memoir of Sir Philip Derval! He owned that he had borne from
the corpse of Haroun the medicament to which he ascribed his recovery
from a state yet more hopeless than that under which he now laboured! He
had alluded, rapidly, obscurely, to some knowledge at his command
"surer than man's." And now, even now the mere wreck of his former
existenc