rdly foe, struck him down with one spurn of my foot. His
hand, as he fell, relaxed its hold on the noose; I freed my throat from
the knot, and sprang from the copse into the broad sunlit plain. I saw
no more of the armed men or the Strangler. Panting and breathless, I
paused at last before the fence, fragrant with blossoms, that divided my
home from the solitude.

The windows of Lilian's room were darkened; all within the house seemed
still.

Darkened and silenced Home! with the light and sounds of the jocund day
all around it. Was there yet hope in the Universe for me? All to which I
had trusted Hope had broken down! The anchors I had forged for her hold
in the beds of the ocean, her stay from the drifts of the storm, had
snapped like the reeds which pierce the side that leans on the barb of
their points, and confides in the strength of their stems. No hope in
the baffled resources of recognized knowledge! No hope in the daring
adventures of Mind into regions unknown; vain alike the calm lore of the
practised physician, and the magical arts of the fated Enchanter! I
had fled from the commonplace teachings of Nature, to explore in her
Shadow-land marvels at variance with reason. Made brave by the grandeur
of love, I had opposed without quailing the stride of the Demon, and by
hope, when fruition seemed nearest, had been trodden into dust by the
hoofs of the beast! And yet, all the while, I had scorned, as a dream
more wild than the word of a sorcerer, the hope that the old man and the
child, the wise and the ignorant, took from their souls as inborn.
Man and fiend had alike failed a mind, not ignoble, not skilless, not
abjectly craven; alike failed a heart not feeble and selfish, not dead
to the hero's devotion, willing to shed every drop of its blood for
a something more dear than an animal's life for itself! What
remained--what remained for man's hope?--man's mind and man's heart thus
exhausting their all with no other result but despair! What remained
but the mystery of mysteries, so clear to the sunrise of childhood, the
sunset of age, only dimmed by the clouds which collect round the noon
of our manhood? Where yet was Hope found? In the soul; in its every-day
impulse to supplicate comfort and light, from the Giver of soul,
wherever the heart is afflicted, the mind is obscured.

Then the words of Ayesha rushed over me: "What mourner can be consoled,
if the Dead die forever?" Through every pulse of my frame throbbe