Nearly maddened between the deeply suppressed, conflicting passions of wounded love, outraged pride, gloomy jealousy, fierce anger, and burning desire of revenge, Philip Helmstedt’s impetuous spirit would have devoured the time between his arrival at the island and Marguerite’s expected return. Now feeling, through the magic power of memory and imagination, the wondrous magnetism of her personality, and praying for her arrival only that all else might be forgotten in the rapture of their meeting--then, with all the force of his excessive pride and scorn, sternly spurning that desire as most unworthy. Now torturing himself with sinister speculations as to where she might be? what doing? with whom tarrying? Then feeling intensely, as resentfully, his indubitable right to know, and longing for her return that he might make her feel the power of the man whose affection and whose authority had been equally slighted and despised. And through all these moods of love and jealousy still invoking, ever invoking, with a breathless, burning impatience that would have consumed and shriveled up the intervening days--the hour of her return; for still he doted on her with a fatuity that neither possession nor time had power to sate, nor pride nor anger force to destroy--nay, that these agencies only goaded into frenzy. Strong man that he was, she possessed him like a fever, a madness, a shrouding fire! he could not deliver himself from the fascination of her individuality. Was she a modern Lamia, a serpent woman who held him, another Lexius, in her fatal toils? So it sometimes seemed to him as he walked moodily up and down the long piazza before the house, looking out upon the sea. At all events she held him! very well, let it be so, since he held her so surely, and she should feel it! Oh! for the hour of her return! All day he paced the long piazza or walked down to the beach, spyglass in hand, to look out for the packet that should bear her to the isle. But packet after packet sailed by, and day succeeded day until a month had passed, and still Marguerite came not. And day by day Philip Helmstedt grew darker, thinner, and gloomier. Sleep forsook his bed, and appetite his board; it often happened that by night his pillow was not pressed, and by day his meals were left untasted.