the time we first saw each other, that accident brought us closely
together. I pass over the rest. We loved! Yet oh what struggles were mine
during the progress of that love! How unnatural did it seem to me to
yield to a passion that united me with my kind; and as I loved her more,
how far more urgent grew my fear of the future! That which had almost
slept before awoke again to terrible life. The soil that covered the past
might be riven, the dead awake, and that ghastly chasm separate me for
ever from HER! What a doom, too, might I bring upon that breast which had
begun so confidingly to love me! Often--often I resolved to fly--to
forsake her--to seek some desert spot in the distant parts of the world,
and never to be betrayed again into human emotions! But as the bird
flutters in the net, as the hare doubles from its pursuers, I did but
wrestle--I did but trifle--with an irresistible doom. Mark how strange
are the coincidences of fate--fate that gives us warnings and takes away
the power to obey them--the idle prophetess--the juggling fiend! On the
same evening that brought me acquainted with Madeline Lester, Houseman,
led by schemes of fraud and violence into that part of the country,
discovered and sought me! Imagine my feelings, when in the hush of night
I opened the door of my lonely home to his summons, and by the light of
that moon which had witnessed so never-to-be-forgotten a companionship
between us, beheld my accomplice in murder after the lapse of so many
years. Time and a course of vice had changed and hardened, and lowered
his nature; and in the power, at the will of that nature, I beheld myself
abruptly placed. He passed that night under my roof. He was poor. I gave
him what was in my hands. He promised to leave that part of England--to
seek me no more.

"The next day I could not bear my own thoughts, the revulsion was too
sudden, too full of turbulent, fierce, torturing emotions; I fled for a
short relief to the house to which Madeline's father had invited me. But