I did not know it then, but you knew it.

Your life was your own; you are not saved nor judged! acquit yourself--undo that which you have done, which Heaven cannot undo--and Heaven will say no word nor will I.You cannot, Abel, you cannot.

That which you have done is done, and yours must be the penalty and the sorrow--yours and mine--yours and mine--yours and mine." This, too, was a phantom, a Rima of the mind, one of the shapes the ever-changing black vapours of remorse and insanity would take; and all her mournful sentences were woven out of my own brain.

I was not so crazed as not to know it; only a phantom, an illusion, yet more real than reality--real as my crime and vain remorse and death to come.

It was, indeed, Rima returned to tell me that I that loved her had been more cruel to her than her cruellest enemies; for they had but tortured and destroyed her body with fire, while I had cast this shadow on her soul--this sorrow transcending all sorrows, darker than death, immitigable, eternal.
If I could only have faded gradually, painlessly, growing feebler in body and dimmer in my senses each day, to sink at last into sleep! But it could not be.