and, in her terrors as well as her charms. The World
for you, Nature for me. Farewell!"

"Nature!" said Mrs. Poyntz, compassionately. "Poor Allen Fenwick! Nature
indeed,--intellectual suicide! Nay, shake hands, then, if for the last
time."

So we shook hands and parted, where the wicket-gate and the stone stairs
separated my blighted fairy-land from the common thoroughfare.

CHAPTER LXVIII.

That night as I was employed in collecting the books and manuscripts
which I proposed to take with me, including my long-suspended
physiological work, and such standard authorities as I might want to
consult or refer to in the portions yet incompleted, my servant entered
to inform me, in answer to the inquiries I had sent him to make, that
Miss Brabazon had peacefully breathed her last an hour before. Well!
my pardon had perhaps soothed her last moments; but how unavailing her
death-bed repentance to undo the wrong she had done!

I turned from that thought, and, glancing at the work into which I
had thrown all my learning, methodized into system with all my art, I
recalled the pity which Mrs. Poyntz had expressed for my meditated waste
of mind. The tone of superiority which this incarnation of common-sense
accompanied by uncommon will assumed over all that was too deep or too
high for her comprehension had sometimes amused me; thinking over it
now, it piqued. I said to myself, "After all, I shall bear with me such
solace as intellectual occupation can afford. I shall have leisure to
complete this labour; and a record that I have lived and thought may
outlast all the honours which worldly ambition may bestow upon Ashleigh
Summer!" And, as I so murmured, my hand, mechanically selecting the
books I needed, fell on the Bible that Julius Faber had given to me.

It opened at the Second Book of Esdras, which our Church places amongst
the Apocrypha, and is generally considered by scholars to have been
written in the first or second century of the Christian era,(1)--but in
which the questions raised by man in the remotest ages, to which we can
trace back his desire "to comprehend the ways of the Most High," are
invested with a grandeur of thought and sublimity of word to which I
know of no parallel in writers we call profane.

My eye fell on this passage in the lofty argument between the Angel
whose name was Uriel, and the Prophet, perplexed by his own cravings for
knowledge:--

"He (the Angel) answered me, and said, I went