Remorse, at times, I could plainly read.
One thing I soon noticed; the room in which Captain Allen died--the north-west chamber before mentioned--remained shut up; and an old servant told me, years afterwards, that Mrs.Allen had never been inside of it since the fatal day on which I attended him in his last moments.
At the time when this story opens the old lady was verging on to sixty.
The five years which had passed since she was left alone had bent her form considerably, and the diseased state of mind which I noticed when first called in to visit the family as a physician, was now but a little way removed from insanity.

She was haunted by many strange hallucinations; and the old servant above alluded to, informed me, that she was required to sleep in the room with her mistress, as she never would be alone after dark.

Often, through the night, she would start up in terror, her diseased imagination building up terrible phantoms in the land of dreams, alarming the house with her cries.
I rarely visited her that I did not see new evidences of waning reason.
In the beginning I was fearful that she might do some violence to herself or her servants, but her insanity began to assume a less excitable form; and at last she sank into a condition of torpor, both of mind and body, from which I saw little prospect of her ever rising.
"It is well," I said to myself.

"Life had better wane slowly away than to go out in lurid gleams like the flashes of a dying volcano.".