She had not uttered a single syllable.

Her silence almost drove me wild.
"What! not one word?
not one ordinary message from a friend to a friend ?--one who is lying ill, too!" Still silence.
"Better so!" I cried, made desperate at last.

"Better, if it must be, that he should die and go to the God who made him--ay, made him, as you shall yet see, too noble a man to die for any woman's love." I left her--left her where she sat, and went my way.
Of the hours that followed the less I say the better.

My mind was in a tumult of pain, in which right and wrong were strangely confused.

I could not decide--I can scarcely decide now--whether what I had done ought to have been done; I only know that I did it--did it under an impulse so sudden and impetuous that it seemed to me like the guidance of Providence.