"No; my limbs are weak, but I trust they can carry me to that home, till
I be borne thence to my last. Farewell! the night grows, and man fills
even these shades with peril. The eve after next, at sunset, we meet
again."

So saying, the hermit waved his hand, and I stood apart, watching his
receding figure, until the trees cloaked the last glimpse from my view.
I then turned homeward, and reached my cottage in safety, despite of the
hermit's caution. But I did not retire to rest: a powerful foreboding,
rather than suspicion, that, in the worn and wasted form which I had
beheld, there was identity with one whom I had not met for years, and
whom I had believed to be no more, thrillingly possessed me.

"Can--can it be?" thought I. "Can grief have a desolation, or
remembrance an agony, sufficient to create so awful a change? And of
all human beings, for that one to be singled out; that one in whom
passion and sin were, if they existed, nipped in their earliest germ,
and seemingly rendered barren of all fruit! If too, almost against the
evidence of sight and sense, an innate feeling has marked in that most
altered form the traces of a dread recognition, would not his memory
have been yet more vigilant than mine? Am I so changed that he should
have looked me in the face so wistfully, and found there naught save the
lineaments of a stranger?" And, actuated by this thought, I placed the
light by the small mirror which graced my chamber. I recalled, as I
gazed, my features as they had been in earliest youth. "No," I said,
with a sigh, "there is nothing here that he should recognize."

And I said aright: my features, originally small and delicate, had grown
enlarged and prominent. The long locks of my youth (for only upon state