"No, thank God!" answered Mr. Bergan, with a look of ineffable relief and gladness; "she is herself again--clothed and in her right mind." PART FIFTH. A BITTER HARVEST. I. A CLOUD FOR A COVERING. The twelvemonth gone by had not passed lightly over Godfrey Bergan. He was not the same man who had refused so peremptorily to listen to Bergan, on that memorable eve of Carice's wedding. Not only had he grown grayer and thinner, slower of gait and heavier of step; not only were his shoulders bent and his head drooping; but his face wore an expression of settled gravity, bordering on melancholy, and his manner was gentle, almost to submissiveness. Since the night when he had staggered into the cabin of the trusty Bruno, bending under the weight of his dripping burden, he had never, in one sense, laid it down. The thought that he had forced his daughter into a marriage so abhorrent to her that she had been fain to escape from it through the awful door of suicide, had never ceased to haunt his mind, and burden his heart and his conscience. It had not occurred to him that the fall from the bridge was accidental, inasmuch as Rosa had deemed it her duty to keep inviolate the secret of her young mistress's errand abroad on that night; he was therefore unable to conjecture why Carice should have sought the river-side at so inopportune an hour, except with a purpose of self-destruction. Nor did it give him any comfort to reflect that her mind must have been set all ajar, before she would have resorted to so desperate an expedient; that only lifted the terrible responsibility from her shoulders to lay it more crushingly on his own. It was he, who, without giving her time to recover from the shock of Bergan's apparent infidelity, or the fatigue and anxiety occasioned by his own illness, had urged her into a union with a man for whom she persistently asserted that she neither had, nor would ever be likely to have, any warmer feeling than respect for his intellectual attainments, and admiration for his professional skill and devotion. To be sure, he had done it solely with a view to her happiness,--doing evil that good might come, and finding too late that "Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he reap." First, on that woful night, he had carried Carice to Bruno's cabin, partly because it was nearer to the scene of the disaster, and partly because he feared to encounter some lingering guest or indiscreet servant, if he took her to the cottage. Fortunately, Bruno and his wife were both within; and the latter immediately applied herself to the work of restoration according to her lights; while the former was dispatched, with suitable injunctions to be secret and expeditious, to bring more efficient aid in the person of Doctor Remy.