passion!--at that very moment my heart was feeding the vulture fated to
live and prey within it forever! Thrice did I resolve to confide in
you, as we then sat together, and thrice did my evil genius forbid it.
You seemed, even in your affection to me, so wholly engrossed with your
own hopes; you seemed so little to regret leaving me; you stung, so
often and so deeply, in our short conference, that feeling which made me
desire to monopolize all things in those I loved, that I said
inly,--"Why should I bare my heart to one who can so little understand
it?" And so we turned home, and you dreamed not of that which was then
within me, and which was destined to be your curse and mine.

Not many weeks previous to that night, I had seen one whom to see was to
love! Love!--I tell you, Morton, that /that/ word is expressive of soft
and fond emotion, and there should be another expressive of all that is
fierce and dark and unrelenting m the human heart!--all that seems most
like the deadliest and the blackest hate, and yet is not hate! I saw
this being, and from that moment my real nature, which had slept
hitherto, awoke! I remember well it was one evening in the beginning of
summer that I first saw her. She sat alore in the little garden beside
the cottage door, and I paused, and, unseen, looked over the slight
fence that separated us, and fed my eyes with a loveliness that I
thought till then only twilight or the stars could wear! From that
evening I came, night after night, to watch her from the same spot; and
every time I beheld her the poison entered deeper and deeper into my
system. At length I had an opportunity of being known to her, of
speaking to her, of hearing her speak, of touching the ground she had
hallowed, of entering the home where she dwelt!

I must explain: I said that both Gerald and myself corresponded
privately with Montreuil; we were both bound over to secrecy with regard