“The opportunity lost is like the arrow sped:  it comes no more.  Your wooden key will fail you next time, as it has failed you this, and you will be baffled—­baffled—­as you tried to baffle me!  Miriam, unseen I pursue you!”

Then he laughed horribly, and faded in the gray dawn, to which I awoke, covered with cold dew, and trembling in every limb.  Had he been there, indeed, in spiritual presence?  Was it his hand that had left that band about my brow—­that surging in my brain—­that weight upon my heart?  O God! had I indeed become the sport of fiends?  At last I wept, and in my tears found sullen comfort.  The image so often caviled at as false in Hamlet came to me then as the readiest interpretation of what I suffered, and thus proved its own fidelity and truth.  “A sea of sorrow” did indeed seem to roll above me, against which I felt the vanity of “taking arms.”

My destruction was decreed, and I had nothing to do but suffer and submit!

All the persecution I had sustained since my father’s death, at the hands of Evelyn and Basil Bainrothe—­all my wrongs, beginning at the heart-betrayal of Claude, and ending with the immurement I was suffering now at the hands of his father—­all my strange life at Beauseincourt, with its episode of horror, its one reality of perfect happiness too fair to last, its singular revelations, its warm and deep attachments, my fearful and nightmare-like experience on the burning ship, the level raft, with the green wares curling above it, the rescue, the snare into which I had inevitably fallen, the Inquisition-walls closing around me—­all were there in one vivid and overwhelming mental summary!

I think if ever madness came near me in my life, it came that night, so crushing, so terrific was this weight which, Sysiphus-like, memory was rolling to the summit of the present moment, to fall back again by the power of its own weight to the valley below—­the valley of despair—–­ and destroy all that it encountered or found beneath it.  Yet, by the time the sun was up, my eyes were sealed again in slumber.

Before I close this chapter, it will be as well to describe the tableau I had caught sight of through the open parlor-door when I tempted my fate and failed.

Standing close in the shadow, so that, even if directed toward me unconsciously, the glance of those within, I knew, could not penetrate the mystery of my presence, I scanned with a sad derision, the scene before me.  With a glance I received the impression that it required moments to convey in narrative.

On the hearth-rug, with his back to the fire, his legs apart, his coat-skirts parted behind him, stood Basil Bainrothe, monarch of all he surveyed, with extended hand, evidently demonstrating some axiom to the two visitors ensconced on the sofa near him, who, with the exception of their booted feet, and the straps of their pantaloons, were beyond my angle of vision.  On the opposite side of the chimney from these inscrutable