in from the darkness; stealthy footfalls which of late I had so often seemed to hear were now referred to their true cause as we saw each other eye to eye. The old Adam had awakened and was come for his inheritance; and the vision of him there across the pane gazing in upon his own, seemed to arraign me for disowning a brother and denying his indefeasible right. I recognized that with this familiar form cold reason had returned to oust the hopes and emotions which had usurped her office. My rush for freedom had ended, as such sallies often do, in exhaustion, capture and despair; upon the thrill and thunder of the charge followed the silence of the dungeon and the anguish of stiffening wounds. The truth, so simply written that a child might have spelled it, lay clear before me: I had left reformation till too late. I was too old to change.

Even a few years before, I might have dashed out, like Marmion, from the prison-fortress; but now the opportunity was past and the portcullis was down. My character with all its faults was formed within me; and the very years which I had passed in the wilderness, instead of averting the danger, had set the final seal upon my fate, for when a man has reached a certain point in life he is intractable to the reforming hand. But though at last I knew myself beaten, and helpless in the hands of an implacable power, I fluttered like a wounded bird and sought wildly for a loophole of escape. I could no longer hope to stand alone against destiny; that conceit was gone: could I find a comrade to help me through the press and lift me when I fell? But here the invincible pride of shyness barred the way, forbidding alike any confession of weakness or any appeal to man's compassion. I could not bring myself to say: I am unable to rule my life, do you undertake it for me. Was marriage a conceivable path of redemption? I had never envisaged it before, but now, in my desperation, I dreamed it for a moment a possible issue. I even fixed upon the person who should thus save me from myself, and beguiled many lonely hours by picturing her charms and enumerating her noble qualities.

She lived in a country house where I had been several times a guest, and she had one of those faces which, in Gray's beautiful expression, speak the language of all nations. Her features had that sunny charm which thaws mistrust; she was dowered with all graces and sweet qualities; and you could no more have doubted the immanent nobility of her nature than you could have dreamed a stain in the texture of a white petal. And with all her gentleness there was present I know not what sign and promise of strength, waking in those who saw her an intuitive trust in loyalty of uttermost proof. She would have flamed indignant against evil, but only evil could have moved her from that equal poise of soul which made her entrance into a room the prelude to higher thoughts and finer feelings. She was naturally kind without consciousness of a mission, neither seeking to enslave nor enfranchise, but by a silent outflowing of goodness ennobling whatever company she was in. Nor was her tongue the prattling servant of her beauty, but a guide of cheerful converse; for just as she charmed without device or scheme of fascination, so she possessed the art of speaking well without seeming to have ever studied it. In the chase after just and felicitous ideas, she could lead or follow over the most varied fields with the intuition of the huntress born. With all these excellences, her wit, her sincerity, her ardour for all things bright and true, she had no conceit of herself but kept her father's house in gladness and loved the country-side.

To her, in these days of imminent dismay, my thoughts flew out as to a fair protecting saint; until the inspiration of her visionary presence wrought in my fancy with such a dramaturgic power, that I seemed to walk daily with her, and to know all those delicate and sweet propinquities by which liking passes into affection and affection is glorified into love. So far did these happy day-dreams carry me, that they brought me to the extreme of imaginary bliss, and poured out for me the wine of untempered joy which thrills the hearts of lovers on the verge of their betrothal. The dreams that followed that magic draught denied me no convincing touch of circumstance, and projected upon a credible and familiar scene the bright possibilities to which fate denied a real existence. The scene was always the same, and the words and movements which entranced me followed each other with almost religious exactitude of detail which the adult demands of his day-dreams and the child of the fairy-tale he loves.

It was always a June afternoon when we went out together, into the meadows near her home; she moving with fluent grace as befitted a daughter of the woods, her eyes indrawing joy from all nature, her hair reflecting rich gold of the sunlight, her whole face lit with the pleasure of a bright hour; I a mere satellite attendant upon its central star. We strolled through the four home-meadows, crossed a high-banked lane and a dingle with a brook running down it, and then from an open common flooded with sunlight passed into a wood of tallest beeches. In that cool, shadowy place the sun, searching a way through crannies in the upper verdure, chequered with patches of silver light the even mast-strewn floor. The multitude of smooth grey stems rose aligned like cathedral columns; and the grateful dimness of the wood, succeeding the glare of day, wakened a sense of purposed protection and quietude pervading all things, which soothed the mind with the illusion that this was a sacred spot appointed for an offering of souls. Near one of those isles of sunlight we lingered; and as she looked up to the source of light, the movement brought her face near the slanting shaft of rays, until there was set round it an aureole of dancing beams. It seemed to me at this part of my dream that there came to both of us some gracious influence, for as her eyes met mine they dropped again, and were fixed for a moment upon the wild flowers she carried. Then my heart began to beat and my whole being to grow greater: impassioned words, to that hour unconceived, came rushing to my lips; the fire and glory of a new manhood were kindling in me to the transformation of my nature—when, in the very moment of utterance, a sheer barrier of doom descended between me and my joy; the fire was quenched, and my soul was poured out within me.

To this fatal point my fancy always brought me and no further, that coming thus to the threshold of the house of joy and hearing the bars shoot into their sockets I might thoroughly know my ineffectual self and leave untouched the forbidden latch. So far I came in my dream times without number; and always on the verge of joy there came that doom, and the shooting of those adamantine bolts.

Yet all the while I wove it, I knew that this texture of dreams must soon be drawn aside, and like the curtain in the tragedy reveal at last the horror concealed within. Such brooding was but the deception of a reluctant spirit dallying and delaying with any trifle by the way to put off the arrival at the hill of evil prospect. At last I learned the lesson of this abrupt ending to the dream at the point of full disillusion; it forced itself upon me with the power of an oracular utterance warning me to cease my palterings with fate. My reason now rebuked me like a stern judge, dissecting all false pleas and laying bare their weakness. What right had I, now knowing myself incurable, even to dream of easing my own pain by darkening and despoiling a second life? The love of solitude was now more to me than even the love of a