recovering--Susan was innocent. He became aware of the facts much in the
same way as his mother became aware of them ere she dropped to sleep in
the blessed darkness of the adjoining room. Confused as he was, with his
brain still full of the pulsations of the past, he was so far conscious
of what had happened. He sat in his reverie, regardless of the time, and
everything else that he ought to have attended to. The little maid came
and knocked at his door to say his dinner had been waiting for an hour,
and he answered, "Yes; he was coming," but sat still in the darkness.
Then the landlady herself, compunctious, beginning to feel the thrills
of returning comfort which had entered her house, came tapping softly to
say it was near six, and wouldn't Mr. Vincent take something before it
was time for chapel? Mr. Vincent said "Yes" again, but did not move; and
it was only when he heard the church-bells tingling into the night air
that he got up at last, and, stealing first to the door of Susan's room,
where he ascertained that she still slept, and then to his mother's,
where he could hear her soft regular breathing in the darkness, he went
away in an indescribably exalted condition of mind to Salem and his
duty. There is a kind of weakness incident to excitement of mind and
neglect of body, which is akin to the ecstatic state in which men dream
dreams and see visions. Vincent was in that condition to-night. He was
not careful what anybody would say or think; he no longer pictured to
himself the up-turned faces in Salem, all conscious of the tragedy which
was connected with his name. The sense of deliverance in his heart
emancipated him, and gave a contrary impulse to his thoughts. In the
weakness of an excited and exhausted frame, a certain gleam of the
ineffable and miraculous came over the young man. He was again in the
world where God stoops down to change with one touch of His finger the
whole current of man's life--the world of childhood, of genius, of
faith; that other world, dark sphere of necessity and fate, where
nothing could stay the development into dread immortality of the
obstinate human intelligence, and where dreary echoes of speculation
still questioned whether any change were possible in heart and spirit,
or if saving souls were a mere figure of speech, floated away far off
over his head, a dark fiction of despair. In this state of mind he went
back to the pulpit where, in the morning, he had thrilled his audience
with all those wild complications of thought which end in nothing. Salem
was again crowded--not a corner of the chapel remained unfilled; and
again, many of the more zealous members were driven out of their seats
by the influx of the crowd. Vincent, who had no sermon to preach, and
nothing except the fulness that was in his heart to say, took up again
his subject of the morning. He told his audience with the unpremeditated
skill of a natural orator, that while Reason considered all the
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