I looked again at my wife.

My joyous ebullitions vanished, and I asked myself who it was whom I saw?
Methought it could not be Catharine.

It could not be the woman who had lodged for years in my heart; who had slept, nightly, in my bosom; who had borne in her womb, who had fostered at her breast, the beings who called me father; whom I had watched with delight, and cherished with a fondness ever new and perpetually growing: it could not be the same.
"Where was her bloom! These deadly and blood-suffused orbs but ill resemble the azure and exstatic tenderness of her eyes.

The lucid stream that meandered over that bosom, the glow of love that was wont to sit upon that cheek, are much unlike these livid stains and this hideous deformity.

Alas! these were the traces of agony; the gripe of the assassin had been here! "I will not dwell upon my lapse into desperate and outrageous sorrow.
The breath of heaven that sustained me was withdrawn and I sunk into MERE MAN.