Here he stood, and looked upon the green winding margin of the streamlet—­but its song he heard not.  With the workings of a guilty conscience, the beautiful in nature can have no association.  He looked up the glen, but its picturesque windings, soft vistas, and wild underwood mingling with grey rocks and taller trees, all mellowed by the moon-beams, had no charms for him.  He maintained a profound silence—­but it was not the silence of peace or reflection.  He endeavoured to recall the scenes of the past day, but could not bring them back to his memory.  Even the fiery tide of thought, which, like burning lava, seared his brain a few moments before, was now cold and hardened.  He could remember nothing.  The convulsion of his mind was over, and his faculties were impotent and collapsed.

In this state he unconsciously retraced his steps, and had again reached the paddock adjoining his house, when, as he thought, the figure of his paramour stood before him.  In a moment his former paroxysm returned, and with it the gloomy images of a guilty mind, charged with the extravagant horrors of brain-struck madness.

“What!” he exclaimed, “the band still on your forehead!  Tear it off!”

He caught at the form as he spoke, but there was no resistance to his grasp.  On looking again towards the spot, it had ceased to be visible.  The storm within him arose once more; he rushed into the kitchen, where the fire blazed out with fiercer heat; again he imagined that the thunder came to his ears, but the thunderings which he heard were only the voice of conscience.  Again his own footsteps and his voice sounded in his fancy as the footsteps and voices of fiends, with which his imagination peopled the room.  His state and his existence seemed to him a confused and troubled dream; he tore his hair—­threw it on the table—­and immediately started back with a hollow groan; for his locks, which but a few hours before had been as black as the raven’s wing, were now white as snow!

On discovering this, he gave a low but frantic laugh.  “Ha, ha, ha!” he exclaimed; “here is another mark—­here is food for despair.  Silently, but surely, did the hand of God work this, as a proof that I am hopeless!  But I will bear it; I will bear the sight!  I now feel myself a man blasted by the eye of God Himself!  Ha, ha, ha!  Food for despair!  Food for despair!”

Immediately he passed into his own room, and approaching the looking-glass beheld a sight calculated to move a statue.  His hair had become literally white, but the shades of his dark complexion, now distorted by terror and madness, flitted, as his features worked under the influence of his tremendous passions, into an expression so frightful, that deep fear came over himself.  He snatched one of his razors, and fled from the glass to the kitchen.  He looked upon the fire, and saw the white ashes lying around its edge.