ess meet their deserts. However much of wrong
or of error there had been in her life, in the moment of death she
found true happiness; and I am grateful to her for arousing the
thought, that we may all end our lives in peace. And so I leave her.

But the boy? The youth now left to buffet with the world alone? I will
ask you to follow him as, with a heart crowded with anguish and
resentment, he rushed bareheaded out into the night, and swiftly sped
through the wood. For he is well worth following. He has reached an
important epoch in his life, a turning point at which he abandons his
boyish past and becomes a man.

Could he have been asked why he ran, or whither, he would have found
himself bewildered and at a loss for a reply. Yet it is easily
explainable. His home-life had never been attractive to him, nor in
any way satisfying to his temperament, which, indeed, as we shall see,
was such that he was ever in ill-concealed rebellion against the
restraints of his surroundings, which threatened to crush his
intellectual yearnings. Nevertheless, it was his home, so endeared to
him by long association, that the sudden realization of the complex
idea, first, that he did love this home, and second that he would now
lose it forever, coming to him instantaneously, overwhelmed him.

He felt a dull pain in his breast, which made him almost imagine that
some heavy body had been thrust within his bosom, and weighed heavily
against his heart, interfering with that vital organ, so that the
blood coursed sluggishly, and the lungs were loath to do their duty.
Thus stifling, though only in imagination, he was instinctively
compelled to rush out into the air, which cooled the fever in his
veins. He ran, impelled by a mysterious feeling akin to fear, yet not
fear, which exists within the breasts of all mankind, however loudly
one individual may declare himself exempt, and which is aroused when
one is suddenly brought into the presence of the dead, alone, and for
the first time. Leon had never seen death before, although he had of
course seen the dead, coffined and made ready for the grave. But he
now passed through an entirely new experience. In one moment he held
within his arms a living, breathing being whom he loved; and in the
next he gazed upon a voiceless, senseless, shocking thing, and loathed
it. It was from this thing, and from the house where this thing now
lay, that he was running. But, as I have said, he did not know it at
t