heart beat. A thunderbolt would have been a relief. Oh God! if there
be a curse, it is to burn, swell, madden with feelings which you are
doomed to conceal! This is, indeed, to be "a cannibal of one's own
heart." [Bacon]

It was sunset. Emily was alone upon the lawn which sloped towards the
lake, and the blue still waters beneath broke, at bright intervals,
through the scattered and illuminated trees. She stood watching the sun
sink with wistful and tearful eyes. Her soul was sad within her. The
ivy which love first wreathes around his work had already faded away, and
she now only saw the desolation of the ruin it concealed. Never more for
her was that freshness of unwakened feeling which invests all things with
a perpetual daybreak of sunshine, and incense, and dew. The heart may
survive the decay or rupture of an innocent and lawful affection--
"la marque reste, mais la blessure guerit"--but the love of darkness and
guilt is branded in a character ineffaceable--eternal! The one is, like
lightning, more likely to dazzle than to destroy, and, divine even in its
danger, it makes holy what it sears; but the other is like that sure and
deadly fire which fell upon the cities of old, graving in the barrenness
of the desert it had wrought the record and perpetuation of a curse. A
low and thrilling voice stole upon Emily's ear. She turned--Falkland
stood beside her. "I felt restless and unhappy," he said, "and I came to
seek you. If (writes one of the fathers) a guilty and wretched man could
behold, though only for a few minutes, the countenance of an angel, the
calm and glory which it wears would so sink into his heart, that he would
pass at once over the gulf of gone years into his first unsullied state
of purity and hope; perhaps I thought of that sentence when I came to
you." "I know not," said Emily, with a deep blush at this address, which
formed her only answer to the compliment it conveyed; "I know not why it
is, but to me there is always something melancholy in this hour--