"Let Faustus live in hell a thousand years, A hundred thousand, and at the last be saved!" Where is he, then?--where is he? She takes counsel of the mute forces of nature--of the clouds, the snows, and the blasts. But of what use? They knew not of his story; or, if they did, they were forbidden to tell of it: silence was laid like a seal upon their lips. It is not in the most edifying books that the grandest sayings are to be found. What can be nobler than this of Rousseau's dying Julie: "Qui s'endort dans le sein d'un père, n'est pas en souci du réveil?" The wearier in body she can return from these long, sad rambles, the better pleased is Esther; for is not weariness the father of sleep--sleep, the one impartial thing under heaven; sleep, the radical; sleep, the leveller, that leaves a king's arms to embrace a tinker? But of what use is it to sleep, if in sleep one hear-- "False voices, feel the kisses of false mouths, And footless sound of perished feet?" And worse even than such dream-tortured slumber is fear-tortured waking. Constitutionally timid, a weakened body and broken spirit have made Esther pitiably nervous. Jealousy, remorse, and fear run a dreary race for the palm of extremest suffering; and I am not sure that fear does not win. The poor child suffers the torments of the damned in her huge hearse-bed in the far-off, rat-haunted, ghostly old chamber. She dreads falling asleep, for fear of waking to find the low fire playing antics with Burke's long nose and spectacles, with Pitt's maypole figure on the screen; flickering over the malignant fleshy Cupids on the wall; waking to see, looking in upon her through the curtains, Jack's face--not kind, _débonnaire_, smiling, as she used to see it in the study at home (for _that_ could frighten no one), but solemn, stiff, with closed eyes and bandaged chin, as she had last seen it. Sometimes she sits up in bed, a cold sweat standing on her brow, as some noise, distincter than usual, sounds through the room; "thud, thud," as of some falling object; an unexplained rustling in the passage; a little clicking in the door-lock--sits up, listening with strained ears, thinking, "Can _that_ be rats?" Momently she expects to see some crape-masked burglar enter the door or window. And if such burglar did enter, it would be useless to scream for help; she is too far off from the rest of the household to be heard: it would be of no use to ring the bell, for it rings downstairs, miles away, and everybody is in bed and asleep upstairs. So she lies quaking--her terror now and then rising to such an uncontrollable pitch that she feels as though, if it lasted a moment longer, she must go mad: listening with intense impatience to the leisurely "Tick-tack, tick-tack, tick-tack" of the cuckoo-clock outside; listening with inexpressible longing to hear it say, "Cuckoo, cuckoo, cuckoo, cuckoo!" four times. At four o'clock she will be safe, she thinks; at four