“I acknowledge it is difficult, but I hope it is not impossible. We have now an opportunity of judging of the strength of your mind, the firmness of your resolution, and your power over yourself. Of these we must see proofs--without these you never could be, either with my consent or by her own choice, accepted by my daughter, even if no other obstacle intervened.--Adieu.” A bright idea, a sudden ray of hope, darted into my mind. It might be all intended for a trial of me--there was, perhaps, no real obstacle! But this was only the hope of an instant--it was contradicted by Mr. Montenero’s previous positive assertion. I hurried home as fast as possible, shut myself up in my own room, and bolted the door, that I might not be interrupted. I sat down to think--I could not think, I could only feel. The first thing I did was, as it were, to live the whole of the last hour over again--I recollected every word, recalled every look, carefully to impress and record them in my memory. I felt that I was not at that moment capable of judging, but I should have the means, the facts, safe for a calmer hour. I repeated my recollections many times, pausing, and forming vague and often contradictory conjectures; then driving them all from my mind, and resolving to think no more on this mysterious subject; but on no other subject could I think--I sat motionless. How long I remained in this situation I have no means of knowing, but it must have been for some hours, for it was evening, as I remember, when I wakened to the sense of its being necessary that I should exert myself, and rouse my faculties from this dangerous state of abstraction. Since my father and mother had been in the country, I had usually dined at taverns or clubs, so that the servants had no concern with my hours of meals. My own man was much attached to me, and I should have been tormented with his attentions, but that I had sent him out of the way as soon as I had come home. I then went into the park, walking there as fast and as long as I possibly could. I returned late, quite exhausted; hoped I should sleep, and waken with a calmer mind; but I believe I had overwalked myself, or my mind had been overstrained--I was very feverish this night, and all the horrors of early association returned upon me. Whenever I began to doze, I felt the nervous oppression, the dreadful weight upon my chest--I saw beside my bed the old figure of Simon the Jew; but he spoke to me with the voice and in the words of Mr. Montenero. The dreams of this night were more terrible than any reality that can be conceived; and even when I was broad awake, I felt that I had not the command of my mind. My early prepossessions and _antipathies_, my mother’s _presentiments_, and prophecies of evil from the connexion with the Monteneros, the prejudices which had so long, so universally prevailed against the Jews, occurred to me. I knew all this was unreasonable, but still the thoughts obtruded themselves.