The next night was clear, and somewhat chill--indications of a cessation of the calm. The rudeness of Crawley had had the effect of keeping my mind from falling into the grasp of the demon of diseased fantasy; but, now my fate was fixed, I had no more to fear from him; and towards midnight, I fell again into the train of imaginings that had formerly haunted me. I had opened the cabin window for air--having felt a suffocating oppression of the chest during the day, proceeding from the extreme heat and the confined apartment. My eyes were again fixed in the direction of the island. I could see the dark shade of the land lying upon the gilded waters. All was still; my thoughts sought again the deep--the grave of George, the fancied condition of his body; and, as my ideas diverged to the calm scene around, it appeared to me as if all nature were dead, and that my own pulsations were the only living movements on earth. Lights now began to move along the shore, and then a fire blazed up into the firmament. The bodies of the savages flitted before it; I had seen the same appearances before; but I was now connected with these orgies in a more _real_ manner than formerly. They ceased, and my mind again sought the recesses of the green deep, where all I loved on earth lay engulfed. My eye at times wandered over the surface of the waters; but I feared to look downwards into their bosom. My attention was suddenly fixed by an object in the sea. I put up my hands and rubbed my eyes. Was I deceived by a fancy? No! a dead body was there, not four yards distant from where I sat. It was that of my husband, rolled up in the same white sheet in which I had seen him extended on the oak table, and with his head raised somewhat above the surface, by the weights placed in the shroud having, as I afterwards thought, descended to the feet. A part of the sewing had been torn off the head, which was bare--the face was openly exposed to me, the moon shone upon it; I could perceive the very features, and even the lustreless eyes, that seemed fixed on the ship. There was not a breath of wind to ruffle the surface of the sea, which shone with a blue lustre in the light of the moon; and the body was as motionless as if it had been fixed on the earth. I have described, hitherto, what actually befell me, with the various states of my mind under extraordinary circumstances of pain and depression. My fancies belonged as much to nature as the facts which excited and nourished them, and must be believed by those who have studied the workings of the mind, even unconnected with the principles and facts of pathology. This was, however, no vision of the fancy, but a reality resulting from well-known physical laws. I sat, fixed immovably, at the window, and felt no more power of receding from it, than I formerly had of resigning my musings. My eyes were fixed upon that countenance which had been the _beau ideal_ of love's idolatry--the fairest thing on earth, and the archetype of my dreams of heaven. I could not fly from it, horrible as it seemed in its blue glare and ghastly expression. I loved it while it shocked me; and all my powers of thinking were bound up in freezing terror. I felt the hair on my head move as the shrivelling skin became corrugated over my temples. That, and the occasional throbbings of my heart, were the only motions of any part of my being; but the body I gazed at seemed to be as immovable, and its eyes seemed not less steadfastly fixed on me than mine were on it.