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 91 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 voice 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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