I slip back into encircling shadows. I
move among men once more with no certainty that I am not absolutely alone.
Even the passion I have felt becomes unreal as if enacted in the dim past.
And that is the torture of it,--the torture of a man in a wide sea who
beholds the one spar that was to rescue him drifting beyond his reach,
beyond his vision. Ah, sweet Jessica, if only I could understand your
grief so that in sympathy I might forget my own! But it all seems to me so
unnecessary--that we should be sacrificed for the religious caprice of a
frantic old man. From the first there was a foreboding of evil in my
heart, but I did not look to see it from this source. I feared always that
the remoteness of my character, which seemed to terrify you with a sense
of unapproachable strangeness, might keep you from responding to my
passion. But that passed away. Then came your opposition to my crusade
against the sentimentalism of the day. That I knew was merely a new phase
of the earlier antipathy, a feeling that there was no room in my breast
for the ordinary affections and familiarities of life, a suspicion that my
true interests were set apart from human intercourse. This, too, passed
away, and in its place came love. And now love is shut out by the
religious caprice of one who dwells in an intellectual atmosphere which I
supposed had vanished from the world twenty years ago. I had not imagined
that the institutes of Calvin were still a serious matter. I have at least
learned something; and while writing against the lack of faith in the
present religion of humanity, I shall at least remember that my own
calamity has come from one inured in the old dogma. It is the irony of
Fate that warns us to be humble.

And so it is ended. I fold away the little packet of letters with their
foolish outcry of emotion, and on their wrapper inscribe the words that
have been oftenest on my lips since I grew up to years of reflection:
_Dabit deus his quoque finem_--God will give an end to these things also.

XLV

FROM PHILIP'S DIARY

May the Weird Sisters preserve me from another such experience! I was
walking in the Park in the evening, and the first warm odours of spring
floating up from the earth troubled me with a feeling of vague unrest.
Some jarring dissonance between the death in my heart and the new promise
of life all about me ran along my nerves and set them palpitating harshly.
Then I came upon a pair of lovers lingering i