The thought of death was in my heart as I spoke the parting words--death by my own act, if life still held out after our separation.
She suspected that thought; she knew it, and never left me till her good influence had destroyed it forever.

But for her I should not have been alive now; but for her I should never have attempted the project which has brought me here." "Do you mean that it was at Miss Elmslie's suggestion that you came to Naples ?" I asked, in amazement.
"I mean that what she said suggested the design which has brought me to Naples," he answered.

"While I believed that the phantom had appeared to me as the fatal messenger of death, there was no comfort--there was misery, rather, in hearing her say that no power on earth should make her desert me, and that she would live for me, and for me only, through every trial.

But it was far different when we afterward reasoned together about the purpose which the apparition had come to fulfill--far different when she showed me that its mission might be for good instead of for evil, and that the warning it was sent to give might be to my profit instead of to my loss.

At those words, the new idea which gave the new hope of life came to me in an instant.