He was suddenly borne up on the winds and storms to the oceans of an
eternal winter. He fell stunned and unstruggling upon the ebbless and
sluggish waves. Slowly and heavily they rose over him as he sank: then
came the lengthened and suffocating torture of that drowning death--the
impotent and convulsive contest with the closing waters--the gurgle, the
choking, the bursting of the pent breath, the flutter of the heart, its
agony, and its stillness. He recovered. He was a thousand fathoms
beneath the sea, chained to a rock round which the heavy waters rose as a
wall. He felt his own flesh rot and decay, perishing from his limbs
piece by piece; and he saw the coral banks, which it requires a thousand
ages to form, rise slowly from their slimy bed; and spread atom by atom,
till they became a shelter for the leviathan: their growth, was his only
record of eternity; and ever and ever, around and above him, came vast
and misshapen things--the wonders of the secret deeps; and the sea-
serpent, the huge chimera of the north, made its resting-place by his
side, glaring upon him with a livid and death-like eye, wan, yet burning
as an expiring seta. But over all, in every change, in every moment of
that immortality, there was present one pale and motionless countenance,
never turning from his own. The fiends of hell, the monsters of the
hidden ocean, had no horror so awful as _the human face of the dead whom
he had loved_.

The word of his sentence was gone forth. Alike through that delirium and
its more fearful awakening, through the past, through the future, through
the vigils of the joyless day, and the broken dreams of the night, there
was a charm upon his soul--a hell within himself; and the curse of his
sentence was--never to forget!

When, Lady Emily returned home on that guilty and eventful night, she
stole at once to her room: she dismissed her servant, and threw herself