"
GRAHAME.
Retrospection is not pleasant in a narrative; but, if Marie has indeed
excited any interest in our readers, they will forgive the necessity,
and look back a few weeks ere they again arrive at the eventful day
with which our last chapter closed. All that Don Felix had reported
concerning the widow of Morales was correct. The first stunning
effects of her dread avowal were recovered, sense was entirely
restored, but the short-lived energy had gone. The trial to passively
endure is far more terrible than that which is called upon to _act_
and _do_. She soon discovered that, though nursed and treated with
kindness, she was a prisoner in her own apartments. Wish to leave them
she had none, and scarcely the physical strength; but to sit idly down
under the pressure of a double dread--the prisoner's fate and her own
sentence--to have no call for energy, not a being for whom to rouse
herself and live, not one for whose sake she might forget herself
and win future happiness by present exertion; the Past, one yearning
memory for the husband, who had so soothed and cherished her, when any
other would have cast her from his heart as a worthless thing; the
Present, fraught with thoughts she dared not think, and words she
might not breathe; the very prayer for Stanley's safety checked--for
what could he be to her?--the Future shrouded in a pall so dense, she
could not read a line of its dark page, for the torch of Hope was
extinguished, and it is only by her light we can look forward;
Isabella's affection apparently lost for ever; was it marvel energy
and hope had so departed, or that a deadening despondency seemed to
crush her heart and sap the very springs of life?
But in the midst of that dense gloom one ray there was, feeble indeed
at first as if human suffering had deadened even that, but brightening
and strengthening with every passing day.
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