Methought I stood a weeping infant by my
father's hearth; by the cold and blood-stained hearth where he lay dead.
I heard the childish wail of Alice, and my own cry arose with hers, as we
beheld the features of our parent, fierce with the strife and distorted
with the pain, in which his spirit had passed away. As I gazed, a cold
wind whistled by, and waved my father's hair. Immediately I stood again
in the lonesome road, no more a sinless child, but a man of blood, whose
tears were falling fast over the face of his dead enemy. But the
delusion was not wholly gone; that face still wore a likeness of my
father; and because my soul shrank from the fixed glare of the eyes, I
bore the body to the lake, and would have buried it there. But before
his icy sepulchre was hewn, I heard the voices of two travellers and
fled."
Such was the dreadful confession of Leonard Doane. And now tortured by
the idea of his sister's guilt, yet sometimes yielding to a conviction of
her purity; stung with remorse for the death of Walter Brome, and
shuddering with a deeper sense of some unutterable crime, perpetrated, as
he imagined, in madness or a dream; moved also by dark impulses, as if a
fiend were whispering him to meditate violence against the life of Alice;
he had sought this interview with the wizard, who, on certain conditions,
had no power to withhold his aid in unravelling the mystery.
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