ly, when the
color unaccountably faded out of all the aspects of life, and
everything appeared pathetically uninteresting. The hours, which in
general were wont to bear me easily on their wings, lost the power of
flight, and toward the close of the day, drooping quite to earth, had
fairly to be dragged along by main strength. Perhaps it was partly
owing to the established association of ideas that, despite the utter
change in my circumstances, I fell into a state of profound depression
on the afternoon of this my first Sunday in the twentieth century.

It was not, however, on the present occasion a depression without
specific cause, the mere vague melancholy I have spoken of, but a
sentiment suggested and certainly quite justified by my position. The
sermon of Mr. Barton, with its constant implication of the vast moral
gap between the century to which I belonged and that in which I found
myself, had had an effect strongly to accentuate my sense of
loneliness in it. Considerately and philosophically as he had spoken,
his words could scarcely have failed to leave upon my mind a strong
impression of the mingled pity, curiosity, and aversion which I, as a
representative of an abhorred epoch, must excite in all around me.

The extraordinary kindness with which I had been treated by Dr. Leete
and his family, and especially the goodness of Edith, had hitherto
prevented my fully realizing that their real sentiment toward me must
necessarily be that of the whole generation to which they belonged.
The recognition of this, as regarded Dr. Leete and his amiable wife,
however painful, I might have endured, but the conviction that Edith
must share their feeling was more than I could bear.

The crushing effect with which this belated perception of a fact so
obvious came to me opened my eyes fully to something which perhaps the
reader has already suspected,--I loved Edith.

Was it strange that I did? The affecting occasion on which our
intimacy had begun, when her hands had drawn me out of the whirlpool
of madness; the fact that her sympathy was the vital breath which had
set me up in this new life and enabled me to support it; my habit of
looking to her as the mediator between me and the world around in a
sense that even her father was not,--these were circumstances that had
predetermined a result which her remarkable loveliness of person and
disposition would alone have accounted for. It was quite inevitable
that she should have