The Parthian dart was there,
and it quivered in its target! I saw that the wedding-party had sailed
for Europe on the same day of the nuptials, to be absent a year, and had
taken with them my dear one!
So far away! Seas rolling between us! Foreign lands, foreign laws
intervening, which might, for all I knew, deprive me of her presence
forever, who was my hope, my life!
"O little sister," I groaned, "was I right, after all, in forsaking you
for a season? Should I not have dared every thing, rather than have so
openly yielded my authority?"
* * * * *
In the mean while, the sanguinary preparations went silently on. In the
gray of a foggy February morning the duel was fought, and Captain
Wentworth fell, as it was at first thought, mortally wounded.
At the request of his excellent physician, Dr. Durand, when the watchers
were exhausted, and vigilance was all-essential in his case, I accepted,
rather than proposed to take, the post of watcher for one night, in
company with his devoted friend and coadjutor Edward Vernon, and
discovered, in my anguish, and in my power over his distracted senses,
my so-far-hidden gift of magnetism.
Insomnolency was destroying him; opiates had been tried in vain to
compose him, and now, under my waving fingers and strained will, he
slept the sweet, refreshing magnetic slumber.
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