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On this occasion Adrian and Idris met after a separation of nearly a year.
Adrian had been occupied in fulfilling a laborious and painful task. He had
been familiar with every species of human misery, and had for ever found
his powers inadequate, his aid of small avail. Yet the purpose of his soul,
his energy and ardent resolution, prevented any re-action of sorrow. He
seemed born anew, and virtue, more potent than Medean alchemy, endued him
with health and strength. Idris hardly recognized the fragile being, whose
form had seemed to bend even to the summer breeze, in the energetic man,
whose very excess of sensibility rendered him more capable of fulfilling
his station of pilot in storm-tossed England.
It was not thus with Idris. She was uncomplaining; but the very soul of
fear had taken its seat in her heart. She had grown thin and pale, her eyes
filled with involuntary tears, her voice was broken and low. She tried to
throw a veil over the change which she knew her brother must observe in
her, but the effort was ineffectual; and when alone with him, with a burst
of irrepressible grief she gave vent to her apprehensions and sorrow. She
described in vivid terms the ceaseless care that with still renewing hunger
ate into her soul; she compared this gnawing of sleepless expectation of
evil, to the vulture that fed on the heart of Prometheus; under the
influence of this eternal excitement, and of the interminable struggles she
endured to combat and conceal it, she felt, she said, as if all the wheels
and springs of the animal machine worked at double rate, and were fast
consuming themselves. Sleep was not sleep, for her waking thoughts, bridled
by some remains of reason, and by the sight of her children happy and in
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