Mark Winston was a Carolinian, and had brought no letters to the North, except to my guardian, so that our house was almost his only visiting-place. There was a pleasant, lively girl, niece to my guardian, staying with us then, and our party commonly consisted of the old people, Mark, Mary Lee, and myself. The spring came on and passed away, and in the latter part of it, we went to a country-seat at New-Rochelle.
Every hour my passion grew stronger; every hour it destroyed some minor characteristic of my nature, and advanced toward its end, the absorption of all my nature into itself. Still I shunned him. inexplicably to myself; I craved to be near him, to hear him, to watch him, to touch him with my dress in passing; but when he came to me, a positive fear would take hold on me, and I would feel almost ill. I stole from him; stole his gloves, his handkerchief; I would have done any act of meanness; I have picked the pockets of his coat when it hung in the hall. Once, noticing that the ribbon of his watch was worn out, Mary Lee gave him another, which he put on; and in doing so, he broke the crystal of his watch, and carried it up to his room. But for this, I would have fainted, or else sprung upon her; but this gave me a gleam of light. When he returned to the drawing-room, I went up stairs, procured another ribbon, and went into his room. I took her ribbon and tore it to pieces with my hands and teeth, and carried it out and stamped it into the black soil of the garden; but that which he had worn I had already in my bosom, and I treasured that and the gloves and the handkerchief, and whatever else of him I had, and kissed them, and sat looking at them in my lap, and slept with them in my bosom through the long nights. Yet for all this I could get no nearer to him.
At last I thought that he began to pay his addresses to Mary Lee, and then I recognized that love had not eaten up all my nature, for hate and rage still existed. Oh! what weary, weary weeks I spent in watching them! How softly I crawled down stairs! How stealthily I stole behind them in their walks! How I watched them conversing in the drawing-room.
On Thursday, the seventh of June—I had bought an almanac, and I used to mark the days on which I saw him—on Thursday, the
