But the boards creaked, and she was watchful.

I had not walked above a quarter of an hour before she was at the door again.
'Gilbert, why are you not in bed--you said you wanted to go ?' 'Confound it! I'm going,' said I.
'But why are you so long about it?
You must have something on your mind--' 'For heaven's sake, let me alone, and get to bed yourself.' 'Can it be that Mrs.Graham that distresses you so ?' 'No, no, I tell you--it's nothing.' 'I wish to goodness it mayn't,' murmured she, with a sigh, as she returned to her own apartment, while I threw myself on the bed, feeling most undutifully disaffected towards her for having deprived me of what seemed the only shadow of a consolation that remained, and chained me to that wretched couch of thorns.
Never did I endure so long, so miserable a night as that.

And yet it was not wholly sleepless.

Towards morning my distracting thoughts began to lose all pretensions to coherency, and shape themselves into confused and feverish dreams, and, at length, there followed an interval of unconscious slumber.

But then the dawn of bitter recollection that succeeded--the waking to find life a blank, and worse than a blank, teeming with torment and misery--not a mere barren wilderness, but full of thorns and briers--to find myself deceived, duped, hopeless, my affections trampled upon, my angel not an angel, and my friend a fiend incarnate--it was worse than if I had not slept at all.
It was a dull, gloomy morning; the weather had changed like my prospects, and the rain was pattering against the window.