Till her breath was stopped she shrieked for help, for mercy.  When she could speak no longer, her gestures, her looks appealed to my compassion.  My accursed hand was irresolute and tremulous.  I meant thy death to be sudden, thy struggles to be brief.  Alas! my heart was infirm, my resolves mutable.  Thrice I slackened my grasp, and life kept its hold, though in the midst of pangs.  Her eyeballs started from their sockets.  Grimness and distortion took the place of all that used to bewitch me into transport and subdue me into reverence.  I was commissioned to kill thee, but not to torment thee with the foresight of thy death; not to multiply thy fears and prolong thy agonies.  Haggard and pale and lifeless, at length thou ceasedst to contend with thy destiny.

This was the moment of triumph.  Thus had I successfully subdued the stubbornness of human passions:  the victim which had been demanded was given; the deed was done past recall.

I lifted the corpse in my arms and laid it on the bed.  I gazed upon it with delight.  Such was the elation of my thoughts that I even broke into laughter.  I clapped my hands and exclaimed, “It is done!  My sacred duty is fulfilled!  To that I have sacrificed, O my God, Thy last and best gift, my wife!”

For a while I thus soared above frailty.  I imagined I had set myself forever beyond the reach of selfishness; but my imaginations were false.  This rapture quickly subsided.  I looked again at my wife.  My joyous ebullitions vanished, and I asked myself who it was whom I saw.  Methought it could not be Catharine.  It could not be the woman who had lodged for years in my heart; who had slept nightly in my bosom; who had borne in her womb, who had fostered at her breast, the beings who called me father; whom I have watched with delight, and cherished with a fondness ever new and perpetually growing; it could not be the same.  Where was her bloom?  These deadly and blood-suffused orbs but ill resemble the azure and ecstatic tenderness of her eyes.  The lucid stream that meandered over that bosom, the glow of love that was wont to sit upon that cheek, are much unlike these livid stains and this hideous deformity.  Alas! these were the traces of agony; the gripe of the assassin had been here!

I will not dwell upon my lapse into desperate and outrageous sorrow.  The breath of heaven that sustained me was withdrawn, and I sunk into mere man.  I leaped from the floor; I dashed my head against the wall; I uttered screams of horror; I panted after torment and pain.  Eternal fire and the bickerings of hell, compared with what I felt, were music and a bed of roses.

I thank my God that this degeneracy was transient—­that He deigned once more to raise me aloft.  I thought upon what I had done as a sacrifice to duty, and was calm.  My wife was dead; but I reflected that though this source of human consolation was closed, yet others were still open.  If the transports of a husband were no more, the feelings of a father had still scope for exercise.  When remembrance of their mother should excite too keen a pang, I would look upon them and be comforted.