Nevertheless, my health deteriorated.

I ate little and slept little and grew thin and weak.

When I looked down on the dark, glassy forest pool, where Rima would look no more to see herself so much better than in the small mirror of her lover's pupil, it showed me a gaunt, ragged man with a tangled mass of black hair falling over his shoulders, the bones of his face showing through the dead-looking, sun-parched skin, the sunken eyes with a gleam in them that was like insanity.
To see this reflection had a strangely disturbing effect on me.

A torturing voice would whisper in my ear: "Yes, you are evidently going mad.

By and by you will rush howling through the forest, only to drop down at last and die; and no person will ever find and bury your bones.
Old Nuflo was more fortunate in that he perished first." "A lying voice!" I retorted in sudden anger.