He goes up to his room, his room and hers. “’I looked round impatiently—­I felt her by me—­I could almost see her, and yet I could not!...  She showed herself, as she often was in life, a devil to me!  And since then, sometimes more and sometimes less, I’ve been the sport of that intolerable torture!...  When I sat in the house with Hareton, it seemed that on going out I should meet her; when I walked on the moors I should meet her coming in.  When I went from home, I hastened to return; she must be somewhere at the Heights, I was certain!  And when I slept in her chamber—­I was beaten out of that.  I couldn’t lie there; for the moment I closed my eyes, she was either outside the window, or sliding back the panels, or entering the room, or even resting her darling head on the same pillow as she did when a child; and I must open my lids to see.  And so I opened and closed them a hundred times a night—­to be always disappointed!  It racked me!...  It was a strange way of killing:  not by inches, but by fractions of hair-breadths, to beguile me with the spectre of a hope through eighteen years!’”

In all Catherine’s appearances you feel the impulse towards satisfaction of a soul frustrated of its passion, avenging itself on the body that betrayed it.  It has killed Catherine’s body.  It will kill Heathcliff’s; for it must get through to him.  And he knows it.

Heathcliff’s brutalities, his cruelties, the long-drawn accomplishment of his revenge, are subordinate to this supreme inner drama, this wearing down of the flesh by the lust of a remorseless spirit.

Here are the last scenes of the final act.  Heathcliff is failing.  “‘Nelly,’ he says, ’there’s a strange change approaching:  I’m in its shadow at present.  I take so little interest in my daily life, that I hardly remember to eat or drink.  Those two who have left the room’” (Catherine Linton and Hareton) “’are the only objects which retain a distinct material appearance to me....  Five minutes ago, Hareton seemed a personification of my youth, not a human being:  I felt to him in such a variety of ways that it would have been impossible to have accosted him rationally.  In the first place, his startling likeness to Catherine connected him fearfully with her.  That, however, which you may suppose the most potent to arrest my imagination, is actually the least:  for what is not connected with her to me? and what does not recall her?  I cannot look down to this floor, but her features are shaped in the flags?  In every cloud, in every tree—­filling the air at night, and caught by glimpses in every object by day—­I am devoured with her image!  The most ordinary faces of men and women—­my own features—­mock me with a resemblance.  The entire world is a dreadful collection of memoranda that she did exist, and that I have lost her.’...

“‘But what do you mean by a change, Mr. Heathcliff?’ I said, alarmed at his manner....