The words came hot from my very heart, and the ice-crust of years under which hers lay benumbed gave way before them.  She trembled slightly; and the same sad, hopeless moan which I had heard at midnight in the Illinois shanty came from her lips.  She sank into a chair, letting her hands fall heavily at her side.  There was no movement of her features, yet I saw that her waxy cheeks were moist, as with the slow ooze of tears so long unshed that they had forgotten their natural flow.

“I do pity him,” she murmured at last, “and I believe I forgive him; but, oh!  I’ve become an instrument of wrath for the punishment of both.”

If any feeling of reproof still lingered in my mind, her appearance disarmed me at once.  I felt nothing but pity for her forlorn, helpless state.  It was the apathy of despair, rather than the coldness of cherished malice, which had so frozen her life.  Still, the mystery of those nightly persecutions!

“Rachel Emmons,” I said, “you certainly know that you still continue to destroy the peace of Eber Nicholson and his family.  Do you mean to say that you cannot cease to do so, if you would?”

“It is too late,” said she, shaking her head slowly, as she clasped both hands hard against her breast.  “Do you think I would suffer, night after night, if I could help it?  Haven’t I stayed awake for days, till my strength gave way, rather than fall asleep, for his sake?  Wouldn’t I give my life to be free?—­and would have taken it, long ago, with my own hands, but for the sin!”

She spoke in a low voice, but with a wild earnestness which startled me.  She, then, was equally a victim!

“But,” said I, “this thing had a beginning.  Why did you visit him in the first place, when, perhaps, you might have prevented it?”

“I am afraid that was my sin,” she replied, “and this is the punishment.  When father and mother died, and I was layin’ sick and weak, with nothin’ to do but think of him, and me all alone in the world, and not knowin’ how to live without him, because I had nobody left,—­that’s when it begun.  When the deadly kind o’ sleeps came on—­they used to think I was dead, or faintin’, at first—­and I could go where my heart drawed me, and look at him away off where he lived, ‘t was consolin’, and I didn’t try to stop it.  I used to long for the night, so I could go and be near him for an hour or two.  I don’t know how I went:  it seemed to come of itself.  After a while I felt I was troublin’ him and doin’ no good to myself, but the sleeps came just the same as ever, and then I couldn’t help myself.  They’re only a sorrow to me now, but I s’pose I shall have ’em till I’m laid in my grave.”