unwelcome question presented itself. For had the gracious spectre—he no longer quarrelled with that definition—lived, as he had fondly supposed, through his life, regained reason and glad, human sympathy through the influence of his will, or had the case, in very truth, been precisely the reverse? Had not she been the active, he the merely passive principle? Had he not reached a higher development, and gloried—for a little space—in conscious possession of genius, had he not lived, in short, through her—and this not by exercise of direct intention on her part, but merely in obedience to the might of her love for another man—a man long dead, but whose name he chanced to bear, and whose appearance he chanced to resemble?

And thereupon a hideous persuasion of his own nullity and emptiness took hold of Laurence. Individuality fled away, disintegrated, dissolved, and was not. The component parts of his physical being returned to their original elements—flesh to earth, gases to air, heat to fire, blood to water. While all the qualities of his mind, his tastes and affections, suffered like dispersal, being claimed and absorbed by the members of those many generations, whose earthly existence had contributed to the eventual production of his own. And the terror of this was augmented, in that, although every atom of his being was thus scattered and appropriated, every smallest fraction of that which had gone to compose his personality was dispersed, yet annihilation of thought did not follow. He was reduced to absolute nothingness; but knowledge of disintegration, knowledge of loss, knowledge—rebellious and despairing—of that same nothingness remained.

Appalled, with the instinct of flight upon him as from some menacing and immeasurable danger, Laurence turned and groped his way back—as a blind man gropes—into the centre of the brightly lighted room. The persuasion of his own nothingness seemed to extend itself to his surroundings. All partook of the nature of illusion, from which sense of sight and touch alike seemed powerless to redeem them. And this begot in the young man an immense desolation and a corresponding need of comfort and of quick human sympathy. Involuntarily, in his extremity, his thought fixed itself, stayed itself, upon Agnes Rivers. Ah! if she would but show herself—she, his well-beloved fairy-lady—he was convinced peace and clear-seeing would follow in her train, that this terror of nothingness would depart, and that sanely, calmly, he should enter into possession of himself once more!

And then, presently, as he moved to and fro in restless search for her, it appeared to him that a rose-red 

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