Is it near morning? Have I dozed again? Night is long. The great hall-clock is striking,--throb after throb on the darkness. I remember, when I was a child, watching its lengthened pendulum swing as if time were its own, and it measured the thread slowly, loath to part,--remember streaking its great ebony case with a little finger, misting it with a warm breath. Throb after throb,--is it going to peal forever? Stop, solemn clangor! hearts, stop! Midnight. The nurses have gone down; she sits there alone. Her bent side-face is full of pity. Now and then her head turns; the great brown eyes lift heavily, and lie on me,--heavily, as if the sight of me pained her. Ah, in me perishes her youth! death enters her world! Besides, she loves me. I do not want her love,--I would fling it off; but I am faint,--I am impotent,--I am so cold! Not that she lives, and I die,--not that she has peace, and I tumult,--not for her voice's music,--not for her eye's lustre,--not for any charm of her womanly presence,--neither for her clear, fair soul,--nor that, when the storm and winter pass, and I am stiff and frozen, she smiles in the sun, and leads new life,--not for all this I hate her; but because my going gives her what I lost,--because, I stepped aside, the light falls on her,--because from my despair springs her happiness. Poor fool! let her be happy, if she can! Her mother was a Willoughby! And what is a flower that blows on a grave? Why do I remember so distinctly one night alone of all my life,--one night, when we dance in the low room of a seaside cottage,--dance to Lu's singing? He leads me to her, when the dance is through, brushing with his head the festooned nets that swing from the rafters,--and in at the open casement is blown a butterfly, a dead butterfly, from off the sea. She holds it compassionately till I pin it on my dress,--the wings, twin magnificences, freckled and barred and dusty with gold, fluttering at my breath. Some one speaks with me; she strays to the window, he follows, and they are silent. He looks far away over the gray loneliness stretching beyond. At length he murmurs: "A brief madness makes my long misery. Louise, if the earth were dazzled aside from her constant pole-star to worship some bewildering comet, would she be more forlorn than I?" "Dear Rose! your art remains," I hear her say. He bends lower, that his breath may scorch her brow. "Was I wrong? Am I right?" he whispers, hurriedly. "You loved me once; you love me now, Louise, if I were free?" "But you are not free." She does not recoil, yet her very atmosphere repels him, while looking up with those woful eyes blanching her cheek by their gathering darkness. "And, Rose,"----she sighs, then ceases abruptly, while a quiver of sudden scorn writhes spurningly down eyelid and nostril and pains the whole face.