Ah! it is a comparatively easy thing, in some exalted mood of mind, to make a supreme offering of affection to the shrine of duty—as easy as self-slaughter is, if that were required! for the wrench of parting, like the throws of death, is but a short agony! But such voluntary immolation is not self-slaughter, it is more, it is the self-inhumation of the living! The heart thus cut off from the love which is its life, does not find the peace of death but the dull anguish of the living tomb—it cannot die, but continues to throb, to yearn and to suffer. Thus the TEST is not in the fierce struggle with temptation and the keen pangs of sacrifice, but in the terrible reaction; in the dull gnawing pain of all the after time; in the aching sense of bereavement, loneliness and utter desolation; in the long succession of dreary, weary days that dawn without hope, and decline without comfort—each an added link to the heavy chain of hapless years, that drag the spirit to the dust; years of slow heart-wasting; years of death in life! Estelle had thought, when she had severed herself from her lover, that the struggle and the agony was over and the victory won. And after the torture of the criminal trial, and the pitiless battery of myriad eyes that had fallen upon her defenseless head, and after the moral warfare between her deep affections and her high sense of duty,—after all the tempestuous, thronged, and trying scenes through which she had been dragged,—worn out in frame and exhausted in spirit, _rest_ had seemed welcome and _solitude_ inviting. She had sighed for “a lodge in some vast wilderness, some boundless contiguity of shade.” She had sought and found in the Headland such a retreat. The very desolation and dreariness of the locality had attracted her. The solitary gloom of the dark pine woods, the sterile brow of the bank, and the lonely waste of waters accorded well with her soul’s sadness. The melancholy days of Autumn—“the saddest in the year;” the incessant weeping of the skies; the unceasing wailing of the wind; the perpetual sighing of the trees for their ever falling leaves; the monotonous moaning of the sea;—all harmonized with the dirge-like, mournful music of her own spirit. But this mood was in itself, morbid and temporary. It would not have lasted, even had Lord Montressor never arrived at the Headland to break it up. Unsuspecting her presence at the house, he had appeared. Unseen by him, she had watched him from her window. Stifling the mighty hunger of her heart, she had suffered him to depart. And then had come the crisis of the fever.