e same world as myself, and I might love her. In
the darkness that followed, I was brought face to face with the most
terrible problems of human fate. I had troubled myself but little about
the question of the survival of the personality after death; I had been
pre-occupied with life. Now I realized out of what human longings and
what human desperation our religions are built. For one gleam of hope
that we should meet again--what would I not have given? But it never
came. The trend of my thought made all such hopes impossible. I have
grown charier of the word 'impossible' now. We know so infinitesimally
little. I had to learn to live on comfortless. All that was strongly
personal in me died. All care about myself went out suddenly, as in
other cases I think it goes out slowly, beaten down by the continued
buffetings of life. I gave myself to my work, and then a curious
decentralizing process took place. I ceased to be the point round which
the world revolved, in my own consciousness. We all start our career as
pivots, if I am not mistaken. The world span, and I, in my capacity of
atomic part, span with it. I mean that this was a continuous, not an
occasional state of consciousness. After that came an unexpected
peace."

"You have travelled a long and hard road to find it!" cried Hadria.

"Not a unique fate," he said with a smile.

"It must be a terrible process that quite kills the personal in one, it
is so strong. With me the element is clamorous."

"It has its part to play."

"Surely the gods must be jealous of human beings. Why did they destroy
the germ of such happiness as you might have had?"

"The stern old law holds for ever; wrong and error have to be expiated."

The Professor traced the history of his wife's family, shewing the
gradual gathering of Fate to its culmination in the tragedy of her short
life. Her father and grandfather had both been men of violent and
tyrannical temper, and tradition gave the same character to their
forefathers. Eleanor's mother was one of the meek and saintly women who
almost invariably fall to the lot of overbearing men. She had made a
virtue of submitting to tyranny, and even to downright cruelty, thus
almost repeating the story of her equally meek predecessor, of whose
ill-treatment stories were still current in the district.

"When death put an end to their wretchedness, one would suppose that the
evil of their lives was worked out and over, but it was not so. The
Eri