restlessness, sleepless nights full of vague and shadowy dejection.
Emily de Reuss was ill, too ill to see him or any one. All callers
were denied. Daily he left flowers and messages for her--there was no
response save a repetition to him always of the doctor's peremptory
instructions. The Countess was to see no one, to receive no letters, to
be worried by no messages. Absolute quiet was necessary. Her nerves
had received a severe shock. Neither from the papers, in the
fashionable columns of which he read regretful accounts of her
indisposition, nor from the servants who answered his continual
inquiries, was there ever the slightest reference to the tragical nature
of it. It was obvious that she had recovered consciousness sufficiently
to lay her commands upon those few who must have known, and that they
had been faithful. Her illness was announced as due to a combination of
a fashionable malady and a severe nervous breakdown. Yet the memory of
that other thing was ever before him, the fierce, white face with the
blazing eyes pressed against the glass, the flash, the wreath of smoke,
the faint, exciting smell of gunpowder, and the spot of blood upon that
alabaster shoulder. It had been murder attempted at least. No
occupation could distract his thoughts from that. The horror of it
seemed ever chilling his veins. He longed to share his knowledge with
some one, to talk it over with her. Neither was possible. Solitude had
never oppressed him more. He grew daily more nervous and hysterical.

For he was all the while tormented by fears and suspicions which stalked
ever by his side, grim and ghostly phantoms. Those wan features and
dark, starving eyes had kindled within him from the first, a hideous
sense of familiarity--against which he fought indeed but ever vainly.
Once before he had seen them, and it was at the moment when his own life
had first come into touch with things tragical. Yet if his memory
served him truthfully, he was surely face to face with an insoluble