Page:Salem - a tale of the seventeenth century (IA taleseventeenth00derbrich).pdf/238

 her temples throbbed, her aching eyes seemed strained unnaturally wide open, and her hot hands and restless arms were tossed wildly above her head.

She had no power to stop the action of mind and memory. Thought seemed to her like the great wheel of some ponderous machine, which, once set in motion, could neither be guided nor stopped, but would go on and on forever, with its terrible but useless activity.

Probably, for the first time in her healthy, happy young life, she realized what wakefulness was, and she lay, with quick beating heart and widely opened eyes, staring into the blank darkness, through long, uncounted hours, that seemed to her inexperience to be interminable.

Of course, in this state of enforced bodily stillness, and unnatural mental excitement and activity, the sad scenes of the previous day, the terrible sorrow she had witnessed and shared in could not be put aside—it was all lived over again in her excited imagination.

Again in memory she went through all