“Eloise,” said her mother, her voice trembling from excessive weakness, “Eloise, my child, farewell--farewell for ever. I feel I am about to die; but, before I die, willingly would I say much to my dearest daughter. You are now left on the hard-hearted, pitiless world; and perhaps, oh! perhaps, about to become an immolated victim of its treachery. Oh!----” Here, overcome by extreme pain, she fell backwards; a transient gleam of animation lighted up her expressive countenance; she smiled, and--expired. All was still; and over the gloomy chamber reigned silence and horror. The yellow moonbeam, with sepulchral effulgence, gleamed on the countenance of her who had expired, and lighted her features, sweet even in death, with a dire and horrible contrast to the dimness which prevailed around! Ah! such was the contrast of the peace enjoyed by the spirit of the departed one, with the misery which awaited the wretched Eloise. Poor Eloise! she had now lost almost her only friend! In excessive and silent grief, knelt the mourning girl; she spoke not, she wept not; her sorrow was too violent for tears, but, oh! her heart was torn by pangs of unspeakable acuteness. But even amid the alarm which so melancholy an event must have excited, the idea of the _stranger in the Alps_ sublimed the soul of Eloise to the highest degree of horror, and despair the most infuriate. For the ideas which crowded into her mind at this crisis, so eventful, so terrific, she endeavoured to account; but, alas! her attempt was fruitless! Still knelt she; still did she press to her burning lips the lifeless hand of departed excellence, when the morning’s ray announced to her that longer continuing there might excite suspicion of intellectual derangement. She arose, therefore, and, quitting the apartment, announced the melancholy event which had taken place. She gave orders for the funeral; it was to be solemnized as soon as decency would permit, as the poor friendless Eloise wished speedily to quit Geneva. She wrote to announce the fatal event to her sister. Slowly dragged the time. Eloise followed to its latest bed the corpse of her mother, and was returning from the convent, when a stranger put into her hand a note, and quickly disappeared:-- “Will Eloise de St. Irvyne meet her friend at ---- Abbey, to-morrow night, at ten o’clock?” [2] These two lines are taken _verbatim_ from Byron’s _Hours of Idleness_.--Ed. CHAPTER VIII. ----Why then unbidden gush’d the tear? * * * * * Then would cold shudderings seize his brain, As gasping he labour’d for breath; The strange gaze of his meteor eye, Which, frenzied, and rolling dreadfully, Glared with hideous gleam, Would chill like the spectre gaze of Death, As, conjured by feverish dream, He seems o’er the sick man’s couch to stand, And shakes the fell lance in his skeleton hand. Wandering Jew.[3]