She awoke unrefreshed, and rose pale and sad. I cannot say that Mrs. Hazleton, when she beheld Emily's changed look, felt any great compunction. If she had no great desire to torture, which I will not pretend to say, she did not at all object to see her victim suffer; but Emily's pale cheek and distressed look afforded indications still more satisfactory; which Mrs. Hazleton remarked with the satisfaction of a philosopher watching a successful experiment. They showed that the preparation she had made for what was coming, was even more effectual than she had expected, and so the abstract pleasure of inflicting pain on one she hated, was increased by the certainty of success.
Emily said little--referred not at all to the subject of her thoughts, but dwelt upon it--pondered in silence. To one who knew her she might have seemed sullen, sulky; but it was merely that one of those fits of deep intense communion with the inner things of the heart--those abstracted rambles through the mazy wilderness of thought, which sometimes fell upon her, was upon her now. At these times it was very difficult to draw her spirit forth into the waking world again--to rouse her to the things about her life. It seemed as if her soul was absent far away, and that the mere animal life of the body remained. Great events might have passed before her eyes, without her knowing aught of them.
On all former occasions but one, these reveries--for so I must call them--had been of a lighter and more pleasant nature. In them it had seemed as if her young spirit had been tempted away from the household paths of thought, far into tangled wilds where it had lost itself--tempted, like other children, by the mere pleasure of the ramble--led on to catch a butterfly, or chase the rainbow. Feeling--passion, had not mingled with the dream at all, and consequently there had been no suffering. I am not sure that on other occasions, when such absent fits fell upon her, Emily Hastings was not more joyous, more full of pure delight, than when, in a gay and sparkling mood, she moved her father's wonder at what he thought light frivolity. But now it was all bitter: the labyrinth was dark as well as intricate, and the thorns tore her as she groped for some path across the wilderness.