“Oh, my God! that I should come to this!  I fear the intelligence will kill her!”

He covered his face with his hands and groaned in agony.  Every eye in that solemn group around him was moist with tears.

“Take me on!” said the sufferer, after a pause.  “Possibly I may be able to hold out till I reach home.  If I do not, Mr. Mandeville, and you should ever see Eveline again tell her that almost with my dying words I craved her forgiveness.”

Duffel the man and villain was subdued, and Duffel the boy was again come to life.  The memory of a mother’s love opened the long-sealed fountain of affection in his sin-encased heart, and he felt once more, in a little degree, as he had done in the days of his innocence.

As he was carried along the current of thought again changed, and he cast a retrospect over the years of crime, which had made him an outlaw, and brought him down to the gate of death.  The dark picture shut out the light of more pleasant memories, and his soul sunk back into the night of darkness which the blackness of his crime had cast around it!  Again he groaned in anguish of spirit and closed his eyes, as if by so doing he would shut out the phantoms of his evil deeds from his soul’s vision.

The excitement of conflicting emotions threw him into a fever, and before he reached his home, which was not till after night, he was delirious.  A broken hearted mother laid her soft hand affectionately upon his head, and called his name in such endearing tones as only a mother’s lips can breathe; but he knew not that it was her, he felt only the touch of a horrid specter, and heard but the mocking of fiends!

Then he raved and bid the ghostly phantoms begone!  Oh, it was terrible to witness his soul-disordered agony, and hear the awful words that fell from his fevered lips!

“Why, in Satan’s name,” he said, “have you come to torment me with your jeers and scoffs, ye minions of h——?  Away with you!  Back! back!  I say, to your black home in the pit!”

Then covering his eyes he lay and shuddered for a brief period, but soon screamed out: 

“Keep your forked tongues out of my face, you hissing devils!”

These paroxysms, upon the horrors of which we have no wish to dwell, lasted all the night, but subsided about the dawn of morning.  The last image conjured up by his distempered fancy seemed to be one of Hadley: 

“Oh, Hadley,” he pleaded in piteous tones, “do not look upon me in that way!  Take from me those mournful eyes, oh, take them away! for that look burns into my heart!  Hadley!  Hadley! have pity on me! and spare me!  Am I not tormented enough already?”

But we will not linger to depict this harrowing scene.  When the fever subsided he was weak as an infant.  His mother asked him if he knew her, and he whispered: 

“Yes, oh, yes!  God forgive me for bringing your ’grey hairs in sorrow to the grave!’ Oh, that I could die with your forgiveness graven upon my heart; but I dare not hope—­I dare not pray for it!”