less, when Hartmann asked me what was to be done with the body? I heard him distinctly; yet I was utterly incapable of reply. My grosser faculties were sensible to his demand; but my reason was paralyzed, and my disordered imagination was morbidly banqueting in the grave, amidst worms and all the elements of corruption. With a harrowing and lingering minuteness was I recalling to myself each successive event of that terrific night, when, in an unhallowed and loathsome communion, the quick wooed and won the dead; when, in the fulness of my heart and my confidence, I expended all the best feelings of my nature, lavished all my tenderest and purest affections on a fair but foul deception, a treacherous incarnation of a resentful spirit, an outcast inhabitant of the dark and ghastly regions of the grave!
Now, all that was mysterious in the conduct of the figure, while—oh horror!—I had believed it to have been my own fair love, was but too easily explained. She received my ring as a proof of my intention to fulfil her desires; but she would make no gift to me which might exist as a fearful pledge of the union of the dead to the living. Her injunction, too, that when I should next “behold my ring on her finger,” I was to “guess her unspoken wishes and scrupulously fulfil them,” was now equally intelligible. And when I gazed again upon the remains of this long persecuted and suffering being, lying in her lonely and unholy grave, afar from all the coffins of her race, and thought that to her vigilance and affection I was indebted for the happiness which I now possessed, much of the horror of my retrospection subsided. I felt that she ought rather to appear to me what she really was, the protecting spirit of my love and my fortunes: and the agitation of my mind gradually ceased. I resolved that I would scrupulously fulfil what I believed to be her wishes; her body should straightways be removed from its ignominious and unhallowed abode, and
