foundation upon
which he had erected the superstructure of his faith crumbled and fell.
He had been deceived! The communications were false! They had originated
in his own soul, and were not really the voice of God.

Through this suspicion, as through a suddenly-opened door, the powers of
hell rushed into his soul and it became the theater of a desperate
battle between the good and evil elements of life. Doubt grappled with
faith; self-gratification with self-restraint; despair with hope; lust
with purity; body with soul.

He heard again the mocking laughter of the quack, and the stinging words
of his cynical philosophy once more rang in his ears. What this coarse
wretch had said was true, then! Religion was a delusion, and he had been
spending the best portion of his life in hugging it to his bosom. Much
of his youth had already passed and he had not as yet tasted the only
substantial joys of existence,--money, pleasure, ambition, love! He felt
that he had been deceived and defrauded.

A contempt for his old life and its surroundings crept upon him. He
began to despise the simple country people among whom he had grown up,
and those provincial ideas which they cherished in the little, unknown
nook of the world where they stagnated.

During a long time he permitted himself to be borne upon the current of
these thoughts without trying to stem it, till it seemed as if he would
be swept completely from his moorings. But his trust had been firmly
anchored, and did not easily let go its hold. The convictions of a
lifetime began to reassert themselves. They rose and struggled
heroically for the possession of his spirit.

Had the battle been with the simple abstraction of philosophic doubt,
the good might have prevailed, but there obtruded itself into the field
the concrete form of the gypsy. The glance of her lustrous eye, the
gleam of her milk-white teeth, the heaving of her agitated bosom, the
inscrutable but suggestive expression of her flushed and eager face,
these were foes against which he struggled in vain. A feverish desire,
whose true significance he did not altogether understand, tugged at his
heart, and he felt himself drawn by unseen hands toward this mysterious
and beautiful being. She seemed to him at that awful moment, when his
whole world of thought and feeling was slipping from under his feet, the
one only abiding reality. She at least was not an impalpable vision, but
solid, substantial, palpitating fle