us,--agonies of that kind we do not brood over as we do over the death or
falsehood of beloved friends, or the train of events by which we are
reduced from wealth to penury. No one, for instance, who has escaped from
a shipwreck, from the brink of a precipice, from the jaws of a tiger,
spends his days and nights in reviving his terrors past, re-imagining
dangers not to occur again, or, if they do occur, from which the
experience undergone can suggest no additional safeguards. The current of
our life, indeed, like that of the rivers, is most rapid in the midmost
channel, where all streams are alike comparatively slow in the depth and
along the shores in which each life, as each river, has a character
peculiar to itself. And hence, those who would sail with the tide of the
world, as those who sail with the tide of a river, hasten to take the
middle of the stream, as those who sail against the tide are found
clinging to the shore. I returned to my habitual duties and avocations
with renewed energy; I did not suffer my thoughts to dwell on the dreary
wonders that had haunted me, from the evening I first met Sir Philip
Derval to the morning on which I had quitted the house of his heir;
whether realities or hallucinations, no guess of mine could unravel such
marvels, and no prudence of mine guard me against their repetition. But I
had no fear that they would be repeated, any more than the man who had
gone through shipwreck, or the hairbreadth escape from a fall down a
glacier, fears again to be found in a similar peril. Margrave had
departed, whither I knew not, and, with his departure, ceased all sense of
his influence. A certain calm within me, a tranquillizing feeling of
relief, seemed to me like a pledge of permanent delivery.

But that which did accompany and haunt me, through all my occupations and
pursuits, was the melancholy remembrance of the love I had lost in Lilian.
I heard from Mrs. Ashleigh, who still frequently visited me, that her
daughter seemed much in the same quiet state of mind,--perfectly