er this than fire
eternal."

And the next day he was so stiff in all his joints he could not move,
and he seemed one great ache. And even in sleep he felt that his very
bones were like so many raging teeth, till the phantom he dreaded came
and gave one pitying smile, and all the pain was gone.

Then, feeling that to go into the icy water again, enfeebled by fasts
as he was, might perhaps carry the guilt of suicide, he scourged himself
till the blood ran, and so lay down smarting. And when exhaustion began
to blunt the smart down to a throb, that moment the present was away,
and the past came smiling back. He sat with Margaret at the duke's
feast, the minstrels played divinely, and the purple fountains gushed.
Youth and love reigned in each heart, and perfumed the very air.

Then the scene shifted, and they stood at the altar together man and
wife. And no interruption this time, and they wandered hand in hand, and
told each other their horrible dreams. As for him, "he had dreamed she
was dead, and he was a monk; and really the dream had been so vivid and
so full of particulars that only his eyesight could even now convince
him it was only a dream, and they were really one."

And this new keynote once struck, every tune ran upon it. Awake he
was Clement the hermit, risen from unearthly visions of the night, as
dangerous as they were sweet; asleep he was Gerard Eliassoen, the happy
husband of the loveliest and best, and truest girl in Holland: all the
happier that he had been for some time the sport of hideous dreams, in
which he had lost her.

His constant fasts, coupled with other austerities, and the deep mental
anxiety of a man fighting with a supernatural foe, had now reduced
him nearly to a skeleton; but still on those aching bones hung flesh
unsubdued, and quivering with an earthly passion; so, however, he
thought; "or why had ill spirits such power over him?" His opinion was
confirmed, when one day he detected himself sinking to sleep actually
with a feeling of complacency, because now Margaret would come and he
should feel no more pain, and the unreal would be real, and the real
unreal, for an hour.

On this he rose hastily with a cry of dismay, and stripping to the skin
climbed up to the brambles above his cave, and flung himself on them,
and rolled on them writhing with the pain: then he came into his den a
mass of gore, and lay moaning for hours; till, out of sheer exhaustion,
he fell into a deep and dre