I need not strive to declare what were my thoughts and feelings as I wandered off from my dwelling and place of espionage that night. No language of which I am possessed could embody to the idea of the reader the thousandth part of what I suffered. An insane and morbid resentment filled my heart. A close, heavy, hot stupor, pressed upon my brain. My limbs seemed feeble as those of a child. I tottered in the streets. The stars, bright mysterious watchers, seemed peering down into my face with looks of smiling inquiry. The sudden bark of a watch-dog startled and unnerved me. I felt with the consciousness of a mean action, all the humiliating weakness which belongs to it. It took me a goodly hour before I could muster up courage to return home, and it was then midnight. Julia had retired to her chamber, but not yet to her couch. She flew to me on my entrance--to my arms. I shrunk from her embraces; but she grasped me with greater firmness. I had never witnessed so much warmth in her before. It surprised me, but the solution of it was easy. My long stay had made her apprehensive. It was so unusual. My coldness, when she embraced me, was as startling to her, as her sudden warmth was surprising to me. She pushed me from her--still, however, holding me in her grasp, while she surveyed me. Then she started, and with newer apprehensions. Well she might. My looks alarmed her. My hair was dishevelled and moist with the night-dews. My cheeks were very pale. There was a quick, agitated, and dilating fullness of my eyes, which rolled hastily about the apartment, never even resting upon her. They dared not. I caught a hasty glance of myself in the mirror, and scarcely knew my own features. It was natural enough that she should be alarmed. She clung to me with increased fervency. She spoke hurriedly, but clearly, with an increased and novel power of utterance, the due result of her excitement. Could that excitement be occasioned by love for me--by a suspicion of the truth, namely, that I had been watching her? I shuddered as this last conjecture passed into my mind. That, indeed, would be a humiliation--worse, more degrading, by far, than all. “Oh, why have you left me--so long, so very long? where have you been? what has happened?” “Nothing--nothing.” “Ah, but there is something, Edward. Speak! what is it, dear husband? I see it in your eyes, your looks! Why do you turn from me? Look on me! tell me! You are very pale, and your eyes are so wild, so strange! You are sick, dear Edward; you are surely sick: tell me, what has happened?” Wild and hurried as they were, never did tones of more touching sweetness fall from any lips. They unmanned--nay, I use the wrong word--they MANNED me for the time. They brought me back to my senses, to a conviction of her truth, to a momentary conviction of my own folly. My words fell from me without effort--few, hurried, husky--but it was a sudden heartgush, which was unrestrainable.