His better feelings, aroused by the startling remembrance of the assurances he had respectively given his father and mother, had for a few hours triumphed over that insatiable longing to penetrate into the mysteries of the past:--but when he again found himself alone in his chamber, in the silence of night, he could not subdue the thoughts which forced themselves upon him, and which were all connected with those mysteries. Thus was it that we again find him pacing his chamber while others slept,--pacing up and down in an agitated and excited manner, and maintaining a desperate struggle within his own soul. For the irresistible temptation which beset him, was to ponder once more and deeply on the incidents of his early days, and to endeavour to retrieve from the abysses of his memory any other recollections that might be slumbering there. For the sake of the pledge given to his mother--for the sake of the assurance made to his father, he strove,--yes--sincerely, ardently he strove--to vanquish that temptation: yet he could not--human nature possessed not so grand a power;--he might have ruled his actions by his will--but his thoughts defied all controul. Yielding, therefore, at length to their current, he was whirled along by the same eddying tide of reflections which had swept him through so considerable a portion of the preceding night;--and now the efforts of memory--by one of those superhuman strainings which, while they seem as if they must break the very fibres of the brain, also appear to evoke a sudden flash from the depth of some profound cerebral cell,--those powerful and painful efforts in a moment, as it were, established a connexion between the name of _Benjamin Bones_ and _the murder of Tamar_! Yes: Charles Hatfield suddenly became aware that the name and the incident were in some way associated:--and he necessarily supposed that, in his childhood, he had heard facts mentioned which had created that impression at the time, but the nature of which he could not now for the life of him recall to memory. This impression was probably vague even at the period when it was engendered; because Charles recollected full well that the utmost caution was adopted by those around him not to discourse upon the particulars of the foul murder in his presence, nor even to respond otherwise than evasively to the questions he put,--he being a mere child at the time.