"For an instant I felt as if I should go raving mad. My brain seemed actually to whirl. Oh! what a wretch did I conceive myself to be! Another moment, and I became all activity—hurrying the small preparations which were necessary for my departure. The terrible words, '_Delay not, or it will be too late!_' seemed fraught with an electric impulse. A post-chaise and four were immediately ordered: I took with me but a small parcel containing necessaries;—all the trinkets, all the jewels, all the valuables which Dunstable had given to me, I sealed up and left behind me. I moreover penned a hasty note to bid him farewell for ever! "I lavished gold upon the postillions to induce them to spare not their horses. The chaise rushed along like the wind. God knows what were my feelings during the few hours which that terrible journey lasted. I cannot attempt to describe them. Oh! if indiscretion and crime have their enjoyments, they are also doomed to experience bitter—bitter penalties. And my punishment was now at hand. It was not so long since I had journeyed along that road with my father—when he first conducted me up to London. Then we had travelled by the coach, and not so rapidly as I was now retracing the same path. Then, too, I had marked many of the most prominent features on the road and in the adjacent country,—here a church—there a picturesque farm—a cottage—a mill—or a hamlet! As I was hurried along in the post-chaise, I looked ever and anon from the window; oh! there were the same objects I had before observed;—there they were, apparently unchanged;—but I—my God—was I the same? "But it was as I drew nearer and nearer to the little village where I was born, that my eyes encountered a thousand objects which aroused feelings of the most acute anguish within me. There was a beautiful hill to the summit of which I had often climbed in my youthful days, accompanied by my brother. There was the stream which turned the huge wheel of the water-mill in the valley, and the path along whose banks was a favourite walk of my father's. The wheel was turning still: my eye could trace the path on the river's margin;—but the days of innocence, in which I had rambled there—a fond, loving, and confiding girl, hanging on my father's arm, or skipping playfully away from him to pluck the wild-flowers in the fields—those days of innocence, where were they? The chaise rolled on; and now the spire of the village church, peeping above the mighty yew-trees which surrounded the sacred temple, met my view. But, ah! what was that sound? The bell was speaking with its iron tongue: its well-known clang boomed over hill and valley. Merciful heavens! it was a knell! 'Oh! no—no,' I exclaimed aloud, clasping my hands together in bitter agony; 'it cannot be! God grant that it is not so!'