They entered the stately measures of the Spanish dance But the
grace of movement which won the murmuring applause of all around
me, only increased the agony of my afflictions. I saw their linked
arms--the compliant, willing movements of their mutual forms--and
dark were the images of guilt and hateful suspicion which entered
my brain and grew to vivid forms, in action before me. I fancied the
fierce, passionate yearnings in the heart of Edgerton; I trembled
when I conjectured what fancies filled the heart of Julia. I can
not linger over the torturing influence of those moments--moments
which seemed ages! Enough that I was maddened with the delirium,
now almost as its height, which had been for months preying upon
my brain like some corroding serpent.
The dance closed. Edgerton conducted her to a seat and placed
himself beside her. I kept aloof. I watched them from a distance;
and in sustaining this watch, I was compelled to recall my senses
with a stern degree of resolution which should save my feelings
from the detection of those inquisitive glances which I fancied
were all around me. If I was weakest among men, in the disease which
destroyed my peace, Heaven knows I was among the strongest of men
in concealing its expression at the very moment when every pulsation
of my heart was an especial agony. I affected indifference, threw
myself into the midst of a group of such people as talk of their
neighbor's bonnets or breeches, the rise of stocks, or the fall of
rain; and how Mrs. Jenkins has set up her carriage, and Mr. Higgins
has been compelled to set down, and to sell out his. Interesting
details, perhaps, without which the nine in ten might as well be
tongueless or tongue-tied for ever. This stuff I had to hear, and
requite in like currency, while my brain was boiling, and dim,
but terrible images of strife, and storm, and agony, were rushing
through it with howling and hisses. There I sat, thus seemingly
engaged, but with an eye ever glancing covertly to the two, who,
at that moment, absorbed every thought of my mind, every feeling
of my heart, and filled them both with the bitterest commotion.
The glances of their mutual eyes, the expression of lip and check,
I watched with the keenest analysis of suspicion. In Julia, I saw
sweetness mixed with a delicate reserve. She seemed to speak but
little. Her eyes wandered from her companion--frequently to where
I sat---but I gave myself due credit, at such moments, for the
ability with which I conducted my own espionage. My inference--equally
unjust and unnatural--that her timid glances to my-self denoted in
her bosom a consciousness of wrong--seemed to me the most natural
and inevitable inference. And when I noted the ardency of Edgerton's
gaze, his close, unrelaxing attentions, the seeming forgetfulness
of all around which he manifested, I hurried to the conclusion
that his words were of a character to suit his looks, and betray
in more emphatic utterance, the passion which they also betrayed.