d the will, the intellectual
consumption (so to term it) had been concurrent with, had strengthened
and been strengthened by, a vein of physical phthisis--by a merely
physical accident, after all, of his bodily constitution, such as might
have taken a different turn, had another accident fixed his home among
the hills instead of on the shore. Is it only the result of disease?
he would ask himself sometimes with a sudden suspicion of his
intellectual cogency--this persuasion that myself, and all that
surrounds me, are but a diminution of that which really is?--this
unkindly melancholy?

The journal, with that "cruel" letter to Mademoiselle van Westrheene
coming as the last step in the rigid process of theoretic deduction,
[113] circulated among the curious; and people made their judgments
upon it. There were some who held that such opinions should be
suppressed by law; that they were, or might become, dangerous to
society. Perhaps it was the confessor of his mother who thought of the
matter most justly. The aged man smiled, observing how, even for minds
by no means superficial, the mere dress it wears alters the look of a
familiar thought; with a happy sort of smile, as he added (reflecting
that such truth as there was in Sebastian's theory was duly covered by
the propositions of his own creed, and quoting Sebastian's favourite
pagan wisdom from the lips of Saint Paul) "in Him, we live, and move,
and have our being."

Next day, as Sebastian escaped to the sea under the long, monotonous
line of wind-mills, in comparative calm of mind--reaction of that
pleasant morning from the madness of the night before--he was making
light, or trying to make light, with some success, of his late
distress. He would fain have thought it a small matter, to be
adequately set at rest for him by certain well-tested influences of
external nature, in a long visit to the place he liked best: a desolate
house, amid the sands of the Helder, one of the old lodgings of his
family, property now, rather, of the sea-birds, and almost surrounded
by the encroaching tide, though there were still relics enough of
hardy, sweet things about it, to form [114] what was to Sebastian the
most perfect garden in Holland. Here he could make "equation" between
himself and what was not himself, and set things in order, in
preparation towards such deliberate and final change in his manner of
living as circumstances so clearly necessitated.

As he stayed in t