holding in her hands the all-unfolded rose of life.  And if I was only her friend, was that a reason why she should permit in me the thousand intimacies of look and caress that are the novitiate of love?  Was it a friend’s calm duty to give me her tiny hand to hold in mine, that I might fold and unfold the rosy fingers, and explore the white dimples that were its ornamenting gems,—­to rest her tired head against my shoulder, even,—­watching all day by the chair where pain, life-long ministrant, held me on the rack?—­was it only friendly that she should press her soft little mouth to mine, and soothe me into quiet as a mother soothes her last, her dearest child?  No! no! no! never could that be!  She knew, she had known, that I loved her!  Deliberate cruelty outlined those lovely lips; every statue-like moulding of that proud face told the hard and unrelenting nature of the soul within.  God forgive her!—­the exclamation escaped me unaware, and recoiled in a savage exultation that such treachery had no forgiveness in heaven or on earth,—­one gleam of desperate satisfaction in that black night.  But in its light, what new madness seized me?  I had held her stainless and holy, intact of evil or deceit; what was she now?  My whole brain reeled; the foundations were taken away; earth and heaven met; even as when the West forges tempest and lightning-bolts upon its melancholy hills, brooding and muttering hour by hour, till at length the livid gloom rushes upward against sun and stars, and the blackening sky shuts down upon the blackened earth, cowering at the shock, and the torrents and flames are let loose upon their prey,—­so an accumulated storm of unutterable agony flung wave on wave above me, wrecked and alone.

Still the night stayed; the black mass of forest that swept up the hill-side stood in mystical gloom, in silence that could be felt; when at once,—­not suddenly,—­as if the night could forbear no more, but must utter some chord with the culmination of midnight horrors, a bird uttered one sharp cry, desolate utterly, hopeless, concentred, as if a keen blade parted its heart and the outraged life within remonstrated and despaired,—­despaired not of life, for still the note repeated its monotone, but of death, of period to its pangs.  That cry entered into my brain; it was unjust of Nature so to taunt me, so to express where I was speechless; yet I could not shut it out.  A pitiful chill of flesh and sense seized me; I was cold,—­oh, how cold!—­the fevered veins crept now in sluggish ice; sharp thrills of shivering rigor racked me from head to foot; pain had dulled its own capacity; wrapped in every covering my room afforded, with blunted perceptions, and a dreadful consciousness of lost vitality, which, even when I longed to die, appalled me with the touch of death’s likeness, I sunk on the floor,—­and it was morning!