gained 32
points in ten minutes, and down again, and up again to Heaven knows
what. Men ran from despair to elation, and behaved like maniacs in
both. Men who were gentlemen at home turned savages here. Men who
were honourable in society turned sharpers here. Madness had them, as
I watched them. A kind of pity for them seized me. I glided in among
them, and lifted my whole heart to stay them if I could. I stretched
the hands that no one saw. I raised the voice that none could hear.

"Gentlemen!" I cried, "count me the market value of it--on the margin
of two lives! By the bonds wherewith you bind yourselves you shall be
bound!... What is the sum of wealth represented within these walls
to-day? Name it to me.... The whole of it, for the power to leave
this place! The whole of it, the whole of it, for one half-hour in a
dead man's desolated home! A hundred-fold the whole of it for"--

But here I lost command of myself, and fleeing from the place where my
presence and my misery and my entreaty alike were lost upon the
attention of the living throng as were the elements of the air they
breathed, I rushed into the outer world again; there to wander up and
down the street, and hate the place, and hate myself for being there,
and hate the greed of gain I used to love, and hate myself for having
loved it; and yet to know that I was forced to act as if I loved it
still, and to be the ghost before the ghost of a desire.

"It is my doom," I said. "I am punished. I am fastened to this
worldly spot, and to this awful way of being dead."

Now, while I spoke these words, I came, in the stress of my
wretchedness, fleeing to the head of the street; and there, I cannot
tell you how, I cannot answer why, as the arrow springs from the bow,
or the conduct from the heart, or the spirit from the flesh,--in one
blessed instant I knew that I was free to leave the spot, and crying,
"Helen, Helen!" broke from it.

CHAPTER X.

But no. Alas, no, no! I was and was not free. All my soul turned
toward her, but something stronger than my soul constrained me. It
seemed to me that I longed for her with such longing as might have
killed a live man, or might have made a dead one live again. This
emotion added much to my suffering, but nothing to my power to turn one
footstep toward her or to lift my helpless face in her direction. It
was not permitted to me. It was not willed.

Now this, which might in another temperam