Her friends trembled for the result of this critical experiment; but she did not sink under it, for her fancy had prepared her for his return.  She was as one in a dream, to whom a tide of unlooked-for prosperity, that would have overwhelmed his waking reason, seems but the natural current of circumstances.  Her conversation, however, showed that her senses were wandering.  There was an absolute forgetfulness of all past sorrow—­a wild and feverish gayety, that at times was incoherent.

The next morning, she awoke languid and exhausted.  All the occurrences of the preceding day had passed away from her mind, as though they had been the mere illusions of her fancy.  She rose melancholy and abstracted, and, as she dressed herself, was heard to sing one of her plaintive ballads.  When she entered the parlour, her eyes were swoln with weeping.  She heard Eugene’s voice without, and started.  She passed her hand across her forehead, and stood musing, like one endeavouring to recall a dream.  Eugene entered the room, and advanced towards her; she looked at him with an eager, searching look, murmured some indistinct words, and before he could reach her, sank upon the floor.

She relapsed into a wild and unsettled state of mind; but now that the first shock was over, the physician ordered that Eugene should keep continually in her sight.  Sometimes she did not know him; at other times she would talk to him as if he were going to sea, and would implore him not to part from her in anger; and when he was not present, she would speak of him as if buried in the ocean, and would sit, with clasped hands, looking upon the ground, the picture of despair.  As the agitation of her feelings subsided, and her frame recovered from the shock which it had received, she became more placid and coherent.  Eugene kept almost continually near her.  He formed the real object round which her scattered ideas once more gathered, and which linked them once more with the realities of life.  But her changeful disorder now appeared to take a new turn.  She became languid and inert, and would sit for hours silent, and almost in a state of lethargy.  If roused from this stupor, it seemed as if her mind would make some attempts to follow up a train of thought, but would soon become confused.  She would regard every one that approached her with an anxious and inquiring eye, that seemed continually to disappoint itself.  Sometimes, as her lover sat holding her hand, she would look pensively in his face without saying a word, until his heart was overcome; and after these transient fits of intellectual exertion, she would sink again into lethargy.

By degrees, this stupor increased; her mind appeared to have subsided into a stagnant and almost death-like calm.  For the greater part of the time, her eyes were closed; her face almost as fixed and passionless as that of a corpse.  She no longer took any notice of surrounding objects.  There was an awfulness in this tranquillity, that filled her friends with apprehensions.  The physician ordered that she should be kept perfectly quiet; or that, if she evinced any agitation, she should be gently lulled, like a child, by some favourite tune.