"The ecstasy of dying in the consciousness of its possession; to enjoy till the last moment the dear delightful feeling of being the owner of those riches for which you have braved everything, privations, disgrace, infamy, the scaffold itself, to be able to say, even as you lay your head on the fatal block,'Those vast treasures are mine!' Oh, death is far sweeter than to endure the living agonies I suffer at seeing the riches accumulated with so much pain, difficulties, and dangers torn from me! Dreadful, dreadful! 'Tis not dying daily, but each minute in the day; and this dreadful state of misery may be protracted for years! Oh, how greatly should I prefer being struck down by that sudden and rapid death that carries you off ere one fragment of your beloved riches is taken from you! For still, with your dying breath, you might sigh forth, 'Those treasures are mine,--all, all mine! None but me can or dare approach them!'" Polidori gazed on his accomplice with profound astonishment. "I do not understand you," said he, at last; "if such be the case, why have you obeyed the commands of him whose denunciation of you would bring you to a scaffold? Why, if life be so horrible to you, have you chosen to accept it at his hands, and pay the heavy price you are doing for it?" "Because," answered the notary, in a voice that sunk so low as to be scarcely audible, "because death brings forgetfulness--annihilation--and then, too, Cecily--" "What!" said Polidori, "do you still hope?" "No," said the notary, "I possess--" "What?" "The fond impassioned remembrance of her." "But what folly is this when you are sure never to see her more, and when she has brought you to a scaffold!" "That matters not; I love her even more ardently, more frantically than ever!" exclaimed Jacques Ferrand, amid a torrent of sighs and sobs that contrasted strongly with the previous gloomy dejection of his last remark. "Yes," continued he, with fearful wildness, "I love her too well to be willing to die, while I can feast my senses upon the recollection only of that night--that memorable night in which I saw her so lovely, so loving, so fascinating! Never is her image, as I then beheld her, absent from my brain; waking or sleeping, she is ever before me, decked in all the intoxicating beauty that was displayed to my impassioned gaze! Still do her large, lustrous eyes seem to dart forth their fiery glances, and I almost fancy I can feel her warm breath on my cheek, while her clear, melodious voice seems ringing its full sounds into my ear with promises of bliss, alas, never to be mine! Yet, though to live thus is torturing--horrible--yet would I prefer it to the apathy, the still nothingness of the grave. No, no, no; let me live, poor, wretched, despised,--a branded galley-slave, if you will,--but give me yet the means of doting in secret on the recollection of this wonderful being; whether she be fiend or angel, yet does she engross my every thought!"