And Ernest,--with what deep self-abasement he acknowledged the errors into which blind passion had led him. With what anguish he reflected on the disgraceful charge he had brought against me. Yes; even with tears, he owned his injustice and madness, and begged me to forget and forgive. "What have I done?" he cried, when, after our passionate emotions having subsided, we sat hand in hand, still pale and trembling, but subdued and grateful, like two mariners escaped from wreck, watching the billows roaring back from the shore. "What have I done, that this curse should be entailed upon me? In these paroxysms of madness, I am no more master of myself than the maniac who hurls his desperate hand in the face of Omnipotence. Reason has no power,--love no influence. Dark clouds rush across my mind, shutting out the light of truth. My heart freezes, as in a wintry storm. O, Gabriella! you can have no conception of what I suffer, while I writhe in the tempter's grasp. It is said God never allows man to be tempted beyond his powers of resistance. I dare not question the word of the Most High, but in the hour of temptation I feel like an infant contending with the Philistine giant. But, oh! the joy, the rapture when the paroxysm is past,--when light dawns on the darkness, when warmth comes meltingly over the ice and snow, when reason resumes its sway, and love its empire,--oh! my beloved! it is life renewed--it is a resurrection from the dead,--it is Paradise regained in the heart." Those who have floated along on a smooth, tranquil tide, clear of the breakers and whirlpools and rocks, or whose bark has lain on stagnant waters, on which a green and murky shade is beginning to gather, with no breeze to fan them or to curl the dull and lifeless pool, will accuse me of exaggeration, and say such scenes never occurred in the actual experience of wedded life; that I am writing a romance, instead of a reality. I answer them, that I am drawing the sketch as faithfully as the artist, who transfers the living form to the canvas; that as it is scarcely possible to exaggerate the dying agonies of the malefactor transfixed by the dagger, and writhing in protracted tortures, that the painter may immortalize himself by the death-throes on which he is gazing; so the agonies of him, "Who doubts, yet does, suspects, yet fondly loves," cannot be described in colors too deep and strong. Prometheus bound to the rock, with the beak of the vulture in his bleeding breast, suffering daily renewing pangs, his wounds healed only to be torn open afresh, is an emblem of the victim of that vulture passion, which the word of God declares to be cruel and insatiable as the grave. No; my pen is too weak to describe either the terrors of the storm or the halcyon peace, the heavenly joy that succeeded. I yielded to the exquisite bliss of reconciliation, without daring to give one glance to the future. I had chosen my destiny. I had said, "Let me be loved,--I ask no more!"