turn, had another accident fixed his home among
the hills instead of on the shore. Is it only the result of disease? he
would ask himself sometimes with a sudden suspicion of his intellectual
cogency--this persuasion that myself, and all that surrounds me, are
but a diminution of that which really is?--this unkindly melancholy?

The journal, with that "cruel" letter to Mademoiselle van Westrheene
coming as the last step in the rigid process of theoretic deduction,
circulated among the curious; and people made their judgments upon it.
There were some who held that such opinions should be suppressed by
law; that they were, or might become, dangerous to society. Perhaps it
was the confessor of his mother who thought of the matter most justly.
The aged man smiled, observing how, even for minds by no means
superficial, the mere dress it wears alters the look of a familiar
thought; with a happy sort of smile, as he added (reflecting that such
truth as there was in Sebastian's theory was duly covered by the
propositions of his own creed, and quoting Sebastian's favourite pagan
wisdom from the lips of Saint Paul) "in Him, we live, and move, and
have our being."

Next day, as Sebastian escaped to the sea under the long, monotonous
line of wind-mills, in comparative calm of mind--reaction of that
pleasant morning from the madness of the night before--he was making
light, or trying to make light, with some success, of his late
distress. He would fain have thought it a small matter, to be
adequately set at rest for him by certain well-tested influences of
external nature, in a long visit to the place he liked best: a desolate
house, amid the sands of the Helder, one of the old lodgings of his
family property now, rather, of the sea-birds, and almost surrounded by
the encroaching tide, though there were still relics enough of hardy,
sweet things about it, to form what was to Sebastian the most perfect
garden in Holland. Here he could make "equation" between himself and
what was not himself, and set things in order, in preparation towards
such deliberate and final change in his manner of living as
circumstances so clearly necessitated.

As he stayed in this place, with one or two silent serving people, a
sudden rising of the wind altered, as it might seem, in a few dark,
tempestuous hours, the entire world around him. The strong wind changed
not again for fourteen days, and its effect was a permanent one; so
that people might hav