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made two or three quick passes with his hand—for I had allowed him to rise,—though I kept between him and the door, which I had locked. She looked at me dreamily, and shook her head as though confused; then she advanced and took my hand, and looked long into my face.
    “Do you know him?” said Hawthorne.
    “I do—that is, I think that I remember him, and will go with him.”
    I turned to Hawthorne again. “Before I leave you, you must tell me one thing—was Miss Berrimore untrue; or was it some devilish trick of yours that misled me that day?”
    “She was always true to you; and on the day that you interrupted us she was under mesmeric influence,” he sullenly replied. “But,” he went on, “it was your desertion that killed her; she could not recall anything that passed that day, after she awoke, and believed that she had given you no cause to leave her without explanation.”
    I took Fanny away, and have never seen Hawthorne since, though the last glimpse I caught of him, standing looking at me with deadly hate, is still present to my imagination. His prediction was true—Fanny sank slowly, and died about three weeks after I rescued her from Hawthorne. I visited her constantly in the home that I found for her. She had lost all distinct remembrance of her past life; me she remembered more by some mysterious influence that I appeared to possess over her, than by reason of our being formerly acquainted. Of Hawthorne she never spoke at all; by some means he had bound her over to keep a silence that she dreaded to break.
    At last she died, painlessly and quietly, and I buried her in the same cemetery where her body was even then supposed to be resting. I let her sleep under her assumed name of Nelly Hotham, and I watched over her grave for many weeks.
    How Hawthorne first obtained possession of her body in order to bring her back to life I never could learn. Now she is safe. Since then I have wandered far and wide, but have never heard of him. Were it not for the want of physical courage, his power would be immeasurable; for I am at last convinced that he claimed no more than he could accomplish. Of my own life I am weary. I have found in this solitude a place where I think my body will meet with no worse fate than to moulder and decay, unnoticed and unburied. This is my birthday, and in a few hours my life will be spent; and hundreds of miles from my fellow men, I will render back my soul, in the hope of at last finding peace.
    THE END OF THE MANUSCRIPT
    The reason I leave here, the reason that I now make this public, is that the other day I met the man whom we buried, the man called, I believe, George Seamore, face to face in the street, and he turned and followed me.

THE LADY ERMETTA; or, T HE S LEEPING S ECRET:
    A SENSATIONAL NOVELETTE IN THREE PARTS, WITH AN ORTHODOX CHRISTMAS INTRODUCTION (1875)
    INTRODUCTION
    It was Christmas Day, and I, the wearied super of a cattle station far out in the back country, was swinging idly in a hammock, in an iron-roofed verandah, where the thermometer stood at a hundred and ten; and imagining that I was keeping a merry Christmas. Not a sound, save the indistinct hum of insect life, was to be heard; all hands on the station, having succumbed to the influence of colonial rum and pudding, were asleep; and I lay and perspired, and smoked, and thought—of what? That is a question that will be answered directly. With my hands clasped under the back of my head, one foot projecting over the side of the hammock, and occasionally touching the verandah post in order to keep myself swinging, I began gradually to lose full consciousness of surrounding objects. I knew that it seemed to be getting hotter and hotter, that the iron roof overhead appeared to be assuming a molten appearance; that I was getting too lazy to keep myself rocking, that my eyelids were growing heavy, and that I should soon give it up and fall asleep, when I heard a deep, deep sigh close to me. I turned—
Saw