ve either comfort in the past or hope
in the future," he continued, "otherwise it is in danger. To me, sir, the
past is intolerably repulsive; one boundless, barren, and hideous
Golgotha of dead hopes and murdered opportunities; the future, still
blacker and more furious, peopled with dreadful features of horror and
menace, and losing itself in utter darkness. Sir, I do not exaggerate.
Between such a past and such a future I stand upon this miserable
present; and the only comfort I still am capable of feeling is, that no
human being pities me; that I stand aloof from the insults of compassion
and the hypocrisies of sympathetic morality; and that I can safely defy
all the respectable scoundrels in Christendom to enhance, by one
feather's weight, the load which I myself have accumulated, and which I
myself hourly and unaided sustain."

Doctor Danvers here introduced a word or two in the direction of their
former conversation.

"No, sir, there is no comfort from that quarter either," said Marston,
bitterly; "you but cast your seeds, as the parable terms your teaching,
upon the barren sea, in wasting them on me. My fate, be it what it may,
is as irrevocably fixed, as though I were dead and judged a hundred
years ago.

"This cursed dream," he resumed abruptly, "that everyday enslaves me more
and more, has reference to that--that occurrence about Wynston
Berkley--he is the hero of the hellish illusion. At certain times, sir,
it seems to me as if he, though dead, were still invested with a sort of
spurious life; going about unrecognized, except by me, in squalor and
contempt, and whispering away my fame and life; laboring with the
malignant industry of a fiend to involve me in the meshes of that special
perdition from which alone I shrink, and to which this emissary of hell
seems to have predestined me. Sir, this is a monstrous and hideous
extravagance, a delusion, but, after all, no more than a trick of the
imagination; the reason, the judgment, is untouched. I cannot choose but
see all the damned phantasmagoria, but I do not believe it real, and this
is the difference between my case and--and--madness!"

They were now entering the suburbs of Chester, and Doctor Danvers, pained
and shocked beyond measure by this unlooked-for disclosure, and not
knowing what remark or comfort to offer, relieved his temporary
embarrassment by looking from the window, as though attracted by the
flash of the lamps, among which the vehicle was