The twelvemonth gone by had not passed lightly over Godfrey Bergan. He was not the same man who had refused so peremptorily to listen to Bergan, on that memorable eve of Carice\'s wedding. Not only had he grown grayer and thinner, slower of gait and heavier of step; not only were his shoulders bent and his head drooping; but his face wore an expression of settled gravity, bordering on melancholy, and his manner was gentle, almost to submissiveness. Since the night when he had staggered into the cabin of the trusty Bruno, bending under the weight of his dripping burden, he had never, in one sense, laid it down. The thought that he had forced his daughter into a marriage so abhorrent to her that she had been fain to escape from it through the awful door of suicide, had never ceased to haunt his mind, and burden his heart and his conscience.

It had not occurred to him that the fall from the bridge was accidental, inasmuch as Rosa had deemed it her duty to keep inviolate the secret of her young mistress\'s errand abroad on that night; he was therefore unable to conjecture why Carice should have sought the river-side at so inopportune an hour, except with a purpose of self-destruction. Nor did it give him any comfort to reflect that her mind must have been set all ajar, before she would have resorted to so desperate an expedient; that only lifted the terrible responsibility from her shoulders to lay it more crushingly on his own. It was he, who, without giving her time to recover from the shock of Bergan\'s apparent infidelity, or the fatigue and anxiety occasioned by his own illness, had urged her into a union with a man for whom she persistently asserted that she neither had, nor would ever be likely to have, any warmer feeling than respect for his intellectual attainments, and admiration for his professional skill and devotion. To be sure, he had done it solely with a view to her happiness,—doing evil that good might come, and finding too late that "Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he reap."

First, on that woful night, he had carried Carice to Bruno\'s cabin, partly because it was nearer to the scene of the disaster, and partly because he feared to encounter some lingering guest or indiscreet servant, if he took her to the cottage. Fortunately, Bruno and his wife were both within; and the latter immediately applied herself to the work of restoration according to her lights; while the former was dispatched, with suitable injunctions to be secret and expeditious, to bring more efficient aid in the person of Doctor Remy.

It soon appeared that—thanks to her father\'s promptness—Carice had sustained little injury from her immersion in the water; but, though heart and lungs were quickly brought to resume their functions, her senses remained fast locked in stupor. Knitting his brows, for a brief space, over this unexpected complication, Doctor Remy betook himself to a careful examination of the patient\'s head; and shortly announced that he had discovered a severe contusion of the skull, implying more or less serious injury to the brain.

The stupor would last hours—possibly days. Meanwhile, many appliances and comforts which the cabin could not afford, would be demanded; he therefore advised her immediate removal to the cottage. Mr. Bergan hastened to break the distressing news to her mother, and to make sure that the house and grounds were clear; then Carice was carefully placed on a litter, and borne to her own room.

It was long before she showed any sign of consciousness, longer still before she was free from the supervening fever and delirium, and capable of coherent thought and expression. When that time came, it was found that her memory of the past five months was a blank. Bergan\'s unaccountable silence, her father\'s trying illness, Doctor Remy\'s unacceptable suit, and the ill-starred marriage ceremony—everything which had distressed her mind or wounded her heart, had been completely wiped out of her recollection as by some friendly, pitying hand; and she was carried back, all unconscious of the transit, to the tender joy and blissful content with which she had parted from Bergan. To her thought it was only a few days since he went; yet, with a pleasant inconsequence, she was already beginning to watch for his return. At first, she had seemed a little bewildered by the change of season; it was amidst the flower and foliage of early summer that Bergan had said good-bye; now, the deciduous trees stood bare against the sky, and the flower-beds were shorn of their glory. But her mind was too feeble to reason, and she soon accepted the fact, as she did many another, without trying to account for it. Enough to know that, winter being near, Bergan must be near also.

It may be noted as a curiously ironical turn of that blind Chance, or Fate, in which Doctor Remy believed, that he was compelled, in his professional capacity, to give orders that Carice should be carefully humored, for the present, in this or any other delusion. There was something at stake of far more importance, to him, than his personal feelings as a man or a bridegroom—namely, the ownership of Bergan Hall. In consideration of that, Carice must be spared everything tending to excite or distress her, and indulged in whatever was soothing to her mind, or pleasing to her fancy.

Meanwhile, he addressed himself, with renewed ardor and determination, to the study of brain diseases. His attention had already been engaged by the recently promulged theory of Gall, that each faculty of the mind had its distinct location in the brain; and he was quick to see the fine field thereby opened to pathological investigation. It was in this direction that he hoped, some day, to make his name famous; and it was chiefly as a means to this end that Bergan Hall was valuable in his eyes. He wanted wealth in order to be able to devote himself exclusively to the study of this branch of medical science, and to pursue it, unhampered by considerations of expense, throughout the books and manuscripts, the practitioners and patients, the hospitals and asylums, the morgues and the dissecting-rooms, of the whole world. Till he could do that, he must content himself with the one patient whom circumstance had thrown into his hands.

But here, he was unexpectedly disappointed, in a measure. Whether it were that enough of her recollection revived to associate him dimly with anxiety and distress; or whether, her reason being in abeyance, she was more controlled by her pure and delicate instincts; certain it is, that Carice\'s fever no sooner left her, than she developed the most unconquerable aversion to him, amounting in time to a degree of terror. At his approach, she either hid her face, and trembled like an aspen leaf, or she fled with cries of fright. And these moments of excitement were followed by such alarming prostration, that Doctor Remy was reluctantly compelled to admit the necessity of keeping out of her sight. His investigations had thenceforth to be conducted through the agency of her parents or of Rosa. Now and then, when she slept,—and her sleep was always singularly profound, the very twin brother of death,—he stole into her room, to acquaint himself with some particular of the location, depth, or progress in healing, of the injury to her head, and to satisfy himself of the state of her general health.

To every one but Doctor Remy, Carice was gentleness itself. She was happiness, too, in a touchingly quiet, dreamy, illogical form. She was content to spend hours at the window, watching for the first glimpse of Bergan, with a smile on her lips, and her eyes bright with eager expectation; and though she sometimes sighed, when the day ended, and he did not come, she was ready to begin the same hopeful watch on the morrow, and never seemed to know how long it had lasted. As she grew stronger, she resumed, in some measure, her old pursuits;—she busied herself with light household tasks; she wrought dainty embroidery with silks and worsteds; she read, chiefly poetry, the music of which seemed to please her ear, without fatiguing her mind; she even noticed the cloud on her father\'s brow, and made gentle war upon it,—conquering, of course, as long as he was in her sight, and never suspecting how heavily it settled back afterward. But all this time, the veil over the past never lifted, nor was the eager watch for Bergan ever abandoned.

The few intimate friends, or the servants not of the household, who saw her occasionally, noticed nothing unusual about her, except the delicacy and languor consequent upon a severe illness; Mrs. Bergan being always present to turn the conversation away from every dangerous point, and guide it through safe channels. To the rest of the world, it was simply known that Carice had suddenly been stricken down, on her wedding night, by a fever, supposed to be of the same nature as the one which had lately prostrated her father; and that she was not yet sufficiently strong to show herself abroad, or see much company at home. Doctor Remy, meanwhile, came and went, and spent as much time at the cottage as could reasonably be expected of a physician with a large area of practice, and an office three miles away from his nominal home. Not a person, outside of the limited household, supposed that he never saw Carice, ............