Thereafter, it was currently reported in the village that Robert Ashley was about to be married to Catherine Hamilton. From that period, the whole character of Mary underwent a change: she was never seen to smile, yet she never wept. Her griefs had left the heart, where they operate to soften or to break, and seized the brain, where they generate dreams of revenge, and frenzied illusions of the fancy. Her blue eye now burnt with a sterner fire than even in her former fits of anger she had ever exhibited; her demeanour, shewing fits and starts, and a general disturbance of all her feelings, told, to the most careless observer, that the change which had come over her extended to the fountain of her feelings, and the springs of her hope. Her usual sympathies seemed to be dried up, and nothing was left but the simoom of a stern and deadly hatred, which shewed itself in sudden exclamations, clenching of the hands, and wild looks. The report was soon circulated, that Mary Lee was mad; but those who knew her better, saw, in her strange conduct and demeanour, only the workings, on a larger scale, of the same spirit which had been noticed by her father at a very early period. The rumours as to the intended marriage of Ashley were indeed true; and they were soon followed by an announcement of a more certain nature, that the marriage was to take place at “The Castle” within a month. The intelligence reached the ears of Mary; but its effect was only to add to the gloom which had apparently taken its eternal seat in her countenance. She spoke to no one of the marriage, and gave no answer when any question regarding it was proposed by the neighbours. Her father, who had watched her conduct, and suspected an undue intimacy between her and Ashley, conjectured the cause of the change that had taken place on his child; but from his knowledge of her peculiar temper, which had uniformly resisted every attempt to draw from her her secrets, or to change the character and hue of her feelings, he despaired of being able to acquire any proof of the reality of his conjecture: so he followed the course suggested by his paternal feelings, and endeavoured to soothe his daughter under her affliction, and soften the obduracy of her apparent misanthropy. His efforts were vain—the change on his daughter’s heart was as complete and lasting as if it had been effected by an organic mal-disposition of its functions; her looks, and short ejaculations of bitter scorn of the higher sanctions of love or marriage, evinced a settled spirit of demoniac frenzy; every indication proved the existence of that extraordinary state of the female mind, produced by a deluded or scorned affection, when the heart, instead of giving way to the revulsion of rejected feeling, and breaking, secretes and nourishes a poison—like the saliva of the serpent which has bit itself—destructive to the destroyer and the victim.