he worlds. Alas for life!
But he would bear on till its winter came. The years would be as tedious
as hell; but nothing that ends can be other than brief. Not willingly
even yet would he fail of what work was his. The world was bad enough;
he would not leave it worse than he had found it. He would work life
out, that he might die in peace. Fame truly there was none for him, but
his work would not be lost. The wretched race of men would suffer a
little the less that he had lived. Poor comfort, if more of health but
ministered to the potency of such anguish as now burrowed in him like a
mole of fire!

There had been a time when, in the young pathos of things, he would shut
his eyes that the sunset might not wound him so sore; now, as he rode
homeward into the fronting sunset, he felt nothing, cared for nothing,
only ached with a dull aching through body and soul. He was still kind
to his fellows, but the glow of the kindness had vanished, and truest
thanks hardly waked the slightest thrill.

He very seldom saw Wingfold now, and less than ever was inclined toward
his doctrine; for had it not been through him this misery had come upon
him? Had he not, with the confidence of all the sciences, uttered the
merest dreams as eternal truths? How could poor Juliet help supposing he
knew the things he asserted, and taking them for facts? The human heart
was the one unreasonable thing, sighing ever after that which is not!
Sprung from nothing, it yet desired a creator!--at least some hearts did
so: his did not; he knew better!

There was of course no reason in this. Was the thing not a fact which
she had confessed? was he not a worshiper of fact? did he not even
dignify it with the name of truth? and could he wish his wife had kept
the miserable fact to herself, leaving him to his fools'-paradise of
ignorance? Why then should he feel resentment against the man whose
teaching had only compelled her to confess it?--But the thing was out of
the realm of science and its logic.

Sometimes he grew fierce, and determined to face every possible agony,
endure all, and dominate his misery; but ever and anon it returned with
its own disabling sickness, bringing the sense of the unendurable. Of
his own motion he saw nobody except in his practice. He studied hard,
even to weariness and faintness, contrived strange experiments, and
caught, he believed, curious peeps into the house of life. Upon them he
founded theories as wild as they were da