Page:Salem - a tale of the seventeenth century (IA taleseventeenth00derbrich).pdf/234

 universal superstition of the age she lived in. If the occurrences of that fearful night—which seemed burned in upon her heart and brain—were natural or supernatural, she could not tell; either way they boded her no good, and they haunted her.

It might be that the terrible secret was all the more terrible to her because she kept it so closely locked up in the recesses of her own breast. She received no sympathy, for she asked none. Between herself and her husband her own wish had made it a forbidden subject, and no one else knew of it—not even to her brother, Judge Corwin, whom she tenderly loved, and with whom through life she had ever been in the habit of full, free interchange of thought and feeling, did she ever in any way allude to the secret weight of gloomy apprehension which was slowly but surely dragging her downward to an untimely grave.

Her naturally delicate, nervous organization could not long bear up against so intense a pressure, and her health gave way. Slowly at first, and almost imperceptibly, but daily more and more speedily, the sad