He paused suddenly--relaxed his iron hold, and fell back perfectly insensible. It is an awful thing to see man fall down in his strength, struck, too, by the lightning of passion. Anne sprang upon her feet. The benumbing spell was broken. His last words had reached her naked soul. She believed him dead, and that he had indeed died _her_ victim. Every other thought and feeling was swallowed up in this belief; she threw herself by his side, uttering the most piercing shrieks, and rending her sable tresses, in the impotence of despair. Poor Emily! it was for her a night of horror; but her fortitude and presence of mind seemed to increase with the strength of the occasion. She turned her cares from the dead to the living. She bathed with restorative waters the pale brow of Manly; she chafed his cold hands, till their icy chill began to melt in the warmth of returning animation. All the while his wretched wife continued her useless and appalling ravings. The morning dawned upon a scene of desolation. In one darkened room lay the snowy corpse, dressed in the white garments of the grave; in another, the almost unconscious Manly, in the first stages of a burning fever; Anne, crouched in a dark corner, her face buried in her hands; and Emily, pale and wan, but energetic and untiring, still the ministering and healing spirit of this house of grief. Yes! darkness and mourning was in that house; but the visitation of God had not come upon it: Pestilence had not walked in the darkness, nor Destruction, at the noon-day hour. Had Anne resisted the voice of the tempter, her child might have still smiled in his cherub beauty; her husband might have still presided at his board, and she, herself, at his side; if not in the sunshine of love, in the light of increasing confidence. Her frame was worn by the long, silent struggles of contending passions, hopes, and fears. This last blow prostrated her in the dust. Had _Anne resisted the voice of the tempter_, all might yet have been well; but having once again steeped her lips in the pollution, the very consciousness of her degradation plunged her deeper in sin. She fled from the writhing of remorse to the oblivious draught. She gave herself up, body and soul, irredeemably. She was hurrying on, with fearful strides, to that brink from which so many immortal beings have plunged into the fathomless gulf of perdition.