s remaining a dark image on
the retina. Then I had a sense of my eyelids quivering, and the living
daylight broke in upon me; I saw gardens, and heard voices; I was seated
on the steps of the Belvedere Terrace, and my friends were round me.

The tumult of mind into which I was thrown by this hideous vision made me
ill for several days, and prolonged our stay at Vienna. I shuddered with
horror as the scene recurred to me; and it recurred constantly, with all
its minutiae, as if they had been burnt into my memory; and yet, such is
the madness of the human heart under the influence of its immediate
desires, I felt a wild hell-braving joy that Bertha was to be mine; for
the fulfilment of my former prevision concerning her first appearance
before me, left me little hope that this last hideous glimpse of the
future was the mere diseased play of my own mind, and had no relation to
external realities. One thing alone I looked towards as a possible means
of casting doubt on my terrible conviction--the discovery that my vision
of Prague had been false--and Prague was the next city on our route.

Meanwhile, I was no sooner in Bertha's society again than I was as
completely under her sway as before. What if I saw into the heart of
Bertha, the matured woman--Bertha, my wife? Bertha, the _girl_, was a
fascinating secret to me still: I trembled under her touch; I felt the
witchery of her presence; I yearned to be assured of her love. The fear
of poison is feeble against the sense of thirst. Nay, I was just as
jealous of my brother as before--just as much irritated by his small
patronizing ways; for my pride, my diseased sensibility, were there as
they had always been, and winced as inevitably under every offence as my
eye winced from an intruding mote. The future, even when brought within
the compass of feeling by a vision that made me shudder, had still no
more than the force of an idea, compared with the force of present
emotion--of my love for Bertha, of my dislike and jealousy towards my
brother.

It is an old story, that men sell themselves to the tempter, and sign a
bond with their blood, because it is only to take effect at a distant
day; then rush on to snatch the cup their souls thirst after with an
impulse not the less savage because there is a dark shadow beside them
for evermore. There is no short cut, no patent tram-road, to wisdom:
after all the centuries of invention, the soul's path lies through the
thorny w