weariness, bearing a conviction of eternity and exhaustion that words cannot hope to utter, she said, “Will it never be morning?” And so this night stayed its pace; my room grew narrow and low; the ceiling pressed on my head; the walls forever clasped me, yet receded ever as I paced the floor; the floor fell in strange waves under me,—­yet I walked steadily, up and down, up and down!  Still the night stayed.  Fever set its hurried pulses fleeting like wild-fire through every vein; a band of hot iron pressed above my eyes;—­but these were adjuncts; the curse consumed me within.  In every moment I heard those calm and fatal words, “I do not love you,” sounding clear and sweet through the dull leaden air of night,—­an air full of ghostly sounds, sighs about the casements, creaking stairs, taps at the window, light sounds of feet in the long hall below; all falling heedless on my ear, for my ghost walked and talked with me, a ghastly reality, the galvanized corpse of a murdered life.

Still the night stayed.  A weight of lead pressed on my brain and concentrated it to frantic power; the months in which I had known her, the only months I could call life, came back to me inch by inch, grain by grain.  I recalled our first meeting,—­the sudden springing into acquaintance,—­the sympathetic power that had transfused those cold blue eyes into depths of tenderness and pity,—­the gay and genial manner that aroused and charmed me,—­the scornful lip that curled at the world for its worldliness,—­that fresh imagination, which, like the spirit of frost, decked the commonest things with beauty; and I recalled those early letters that had passed between us,—­mine, insipid enough,—­hers, piquant, graphic, refined, tender, delicately passionate, sparkling, full of lofty thought and profound feeling.  Good God! could she not have taken my heart, and wrung it, and thrown it away, under some more commonplace pretext than the profaned name of Friendship?  Her friend!  It is true I had called myself her friend; I had been strenuous in the nomenclature to quiet my own conscience,—­to satisfy her conventional scruples; but had she no instinct to interpret the pretence?  What friend ever lived on every look, studied every phrase, watched every action and expression, was so torn with jealousy and racked with doubt, bore so humbly with caprices, and forgave every offence so instantly and utterly,—­nay, was scarce conscious that anything her soul entertained could be an offence, could be wrong?  Friendship!—­ah, that deity is calm and serene; that firm lip and pale cheek do not flush with apprehension or quiver with passion; that tranquil eye does not shine with anything but quiet tears.  Rather call the dusky and dark-haired Twilight, whose pensive face is limned against the western hills, by the name of that fierce and fervid Noon that stands erect under the hot zenith, instinct with the red blood of a thousand summers, casting her glittering tresses abroad upon the south-wind, and