“Was it strange that I felt no resentment towards her? Perhaps had I _loved_ her more this would have been otherwise; perhaps all feeling of anger was drowned in _humiliation_. At length I got down stairs. It was impossible then to refuse myself to my visitors. They were my oldest and gravest parishioners. They were a long time in breaking the ice of the subject congealing around my heart, but when at length it _was_ broken, the waters of sympathy flowed freely. ‘Cut off this abomination from your house!’ ‘Amputate this polluted—this putrid limb, though it were your right hand!’ This was their advice, and I followed it. The necessary steps occupied me some time. The necessity of settling my chaotic household and arranging my future plan of living kept me busy for some weeks. Still even then, between the pauses of practical duty, my mind would suddenly fall into stagnation, when neither memory nor reason could be aroused, when only _instinct_ kept me silent or sententious, lest I should expose myself; into that terrible state when the mind hovers on the shadowy boundary of madness—the twilight hour between the day of reason and the night of insanity—upon the awful line dividing _conscious_ from _un_conscious madness! But madness affects the whole system. The blood was sent in rushing force and choking volume to my heart, and forth again with lightning speed, in lava streams, down my veins, impelling me to leaping phrensy! Oh! how I dreaded when this chained demon would burst the weak fetters of my will! This dread!—this dread! I dared not confide it to any one—dared not consult a physician. I furtively read all the books I could upon the subject, and took all the means I could to avert the impending—the hourly—the momentarily impending horror! Oh, Sophie! on God’s earth there is not a grief or terror like this; bearing a fiend in your bosom, bound by the feeblest threads of consciousness and will—threads that you fear and feel may be burst asunder at any moment. I walked with reeling brain upon the slippery edge of a dizzy precipice!—I walked, as it were, upon a mine that threatened every instant to explode! Everywhere—at home, abroad, walking, riding, in the full glory of noonday, in the dark watches of the night, I bore this grenade of the bosom! In the pulpit, Sophie—in the midst of the most closely reasoned argument, suddenly the blood would rush through my veins, and into my head, impelling me to leap, shouting, over the pulpit-top, and throttle some of the people before me. This impending horror—the constant _dread_ of it, accelerated the hour of its fall upon me. One day, late in the evening, I was riding home with Raymond. We were, as usual, _silent_, for oh, Sophie! we sat together long hours at home in silence—we rode together long miles without exchanging a word. The forest-path through which we rode was the same one I had passed in going home upon the evening of my household wreck. The shadows were as dark in the woods, the dew was