"Yes," she replied; "bear with me yet a little while, and I'll go. It is near the time I promised Marian, when last I kissed her wintry cheek, as she lay shrouded in her coffin; and I may not fail. Lord! Lord! what a troubled and worthless world this seems to me now! A week ago, and the sun, and the moon, and the stars, and the green earth, and all that was upon it, were dear to mine eyes; and I should have wept to look my last at them! But now, I behold nothing it contains, save my Marian's grave! You will see _me_ laid in it, for pity's sake--won't you?" "Ay," said Peverell, "but that will be when I am gray, and thinking of my own: so, cheer up. He that shall toll the bell for thee, now sleeps in his cradle, I'll warrant." She beckoned Peverell to her, and taking his hand, she again placed it on her heart. A sad, melancholy smile played for a moment across her pale wrinkled face, and her glazed eyes kindled into a fleeting expressing of frightful gladness, as she feebly exclaimed, "Do you feel? One!--one!--one! --and hardly that--I breathe only from here," she continued, pointing to her throat. "Feel!--feel!--one!--one!--another!--how I gasp--see!--see--" She ceased to speak; the hand which retained Peverell's relaxed its hold--her head dropped--one long-drawn sigh was heaved--and poor Madge resigned a being touched with sympathies and feelings not often found in natures of nobler quality, in the world's catalogue of nobility. If, among the thousand doors which death holds open for mortal man to pass through, ere he puts on immortality, there be one, the rarest of them all, for broken hearts, this hapless creature found it. A self accusing spirit bowed her to the earth, with the sharpest of all griefs--a mother's anguish for an only child--lost to her, as gamesters lose fortunes--thrown away by her own hand. * * * * * FITZMAURICE THE MAGICIAN. "_I have lived three hundred years!_ In that time--in all that time, I have never seen the glorious sun descend, but followed still its rolling course through the regions of illimitable space. I have shivered on the frozen mountains of the icy north, and fainted beneath the sultry skies of the blazing east: the swift winds have been my viewless chariot, and on their careering wings I have been hurried from clime to clime. But, nor light, nor air, nor heat, nor cold, have been to me as to the rest of my species; for I was doomed to find in their extremes a perpetual torment. I howled, under the sharp, pinching pangs of the icy north; I panted with agony, in the scorching fervour of the blazing east; and when mine eyes have ached, with vain efforts, to pierce the darkness of the earth's centre, they have been suddenly blasted with excessive and intolerable delight.