“Have you ever seen us together, that you pronounce him very much in love?” I asked, in a hard, cold, subdued voice that startled my own ear, and made him serious at once.

“Never.  But he wears the absent, dreamy air of a lover; even when alone it is noticeable, Miriam.  I can always tell when a man is preoccupied in that way.”

“If you could go a little further, and divine the object of such preoccupation, you would be better prepared to counsel me, dear friend.  He is no lover of mine, I assure you!”

“Ah, the old story again, Miriam!  Have patience, my dear child.”  And, strong in his belief that my change of resolution arose only from pique and jealousy, that would soon be over, the good doctor went his way, all the more ready to keep my secret for such conviction.

I passed a miserable night.  The great bed seemed to inclose me like a sepulchre, which yet I was too feeble, too irresolute, to leave.  The conversation I had heard seemed stereotyped on plates of brass, that rang like cymbals in my ears.  Toward morning I slept.  I dreamed that mamma came to me, and said, in tones so natural that they seemed to sound in my ears after I had awakened: 

“Miriam, your mother and father have sent me to say to you that they are united and happy.  I, too, have found my mate at last.  It was for this I was called.  The sea has given up its dead, and I am blessed.  Now, dearest, Mabel is all yours;” and then she kissed me.

I woke with that kiss upon my cheek.

The brief and distinct vision made a deep impression on me.  I awoke refreshed and strengthened, as from a magnetic slumber.

At first, a sense of joy alone possessed me, but soon the great bitter burden came rolling back upon my soul, like the stone of Sisyphus, which my sleeping soul had heaved away.

It is a beautiful law of our being, that we rarely dream of that which occupies and troubles us most in the daytime.  Compensation is carried out in this way, as in many others, insensibly, and the balance of thought kept equal.  I have heard persons complain frequently that they could not dream of their dead, with whom their waking thoughts were ever filled.  But madness must have been the consequence, had there been no repose for the mind from one engrossing image.

Relaxation comes to us in dreams at times when the brain needs it most, and to lose the consciousness of a sorrow is to cast off its burden for a time, and gain new strength to bear it.

I thought, when I first arose from my bed, that I would write to Claude Bainrothe, and thus save myself the trial of an interview.  But the necessity of secrecy, in the commencement at least of the rupture, on his own account, presented itself too forcibly to my mind to permit me such self-indulgence.  I felt assured in the first bitterness of feeling, that he would lay my letters before Evelyn, from whom I especially wished, for household peace, to preserve the knowledge of what had passed in my chamber between herself and him.