new grounds for torment, and yet cries aloud
when it finds what it sought. His imagination wandered perpetually from
the lovely pastel in the yellow salon to the new ebony bed, with its
inlaid ivory scenes in the bedroom, and saw or guessed things between
these two points that made him shudder.

Thus, New Year's night found him in a very gloomy frame of mind, and
the letter he wrote to Schrotter expressed a still deeper dejection
than that of the year before. Since recounting the conversation about
the donkey in Ault, he had never again mentioned Pilar to his friend,
nor betrayed by a single word the circumstances in which he had lived
since the middle of August. Such disclosures would have necessitated a
moral effort on his part, for which even his friendship for Schrotter
could not supply him with sufficient force. He knew that Schrotter's
views on morality were neither narrow nor pharisaical, that to him
virtue did not consist in the outward observance of social rules, but
in self-forgetful, brotherly love and a strict adherence to duty. It
would have afforded him unspeakable relief to have been able to pour
out his heart to his friend, to give him an insight into his turbid
love-story and the conflict in his soul. But a sense of shame--the
outcome, no doubt, of his own disgust at the unsavory accessories of
his love--had withheld him from making these confidences. He made none
now, complained only in a general way of the emptiness of his life, to
which neither desire nor hope bound him any more; especially that he
had no future, and looked forward to each new day with horror and
shrinking.

Schrotter's answer was, as usual, full of faithful affection and wise
encouragement. He chid him gently for his want of spirit, and then went
on to say:

"You have no future! I am amazed at such a remark in the mouth of a man
of thought. Which one of us can say he has a future? To say we have a
future is simply to say that we wish for something, strive after
something, set some aim before us. That which we call a man's future
does not lie outside of him, but in himself. I would have you observe
that events rarely or never happen as we expect, and that the plans
which we have worked out most zealously are scarcely ever carried out.
And yet we firmly believe, all the time, that we have a future. Nature
permits us no outlook into Time. A wall rises before our eyes to hide
what is coming. But the cheerless nakedness of that wall b