On the evening of the second Mr. Falkland arrived, accompanied by Doctor
Wilson, the physician by whom she had previously been attended. The
scene he was called upon to witness was such as to be most exquisitely
agonising to a man of his acute sensibility. The news of the arrest had
given him an inexpressible shock; he was transported out of himself at
the unexampled malignity of its author. But, when he saw the figure of
Miss Melville, haggard, and a warrant of death written in her
countenance, a victim to the diabolical passions of her kinsman, it
seemed too much to be endured. When he entered, she was in the midst of
one of her fits of delirium, and immediately mistook her visitors for
two assassins. She asked, where they had hid her Falkland, her lord, her
life, her husband! and demanded that they should restore to her his
mangled corpse, that she might embrace him with her dying arms, breathe
her last upon his lips, and be buried in the same grave. She reproached
them with the sordidness of their conduct in becoming the tools of her
vile cousin, who had deprived her of her reason, and would never be
contented till he had murdered her. Mr. Falkland tore himself away from
this painful scene, and, leaving Doctor Wilson with his patient, desired
him, when he had given the necessary directions, to follow him to his
inn.

The perpetual hurry of spirits in which Miss Melville had been kept for
several days, by the nature of her indisposition, was extremely
exhausting to her; and, in about an hour from the visit of Mr. Falkland,
her delirium subsided, and left her in so low a state as to render it
difficult to perceive any signs of life. Doctor Wilson, who had
withdrawn, to soothe, if possible, the disturbed and impatient thoughts
of Mr. Falkland, was summoned afresh upon this change of symptoms, and
sat by the bed-side during the remainder of the night. The situation of