ford buildings looking sadly
down? Death here! Death there! Death everywhere, yawning under life from
the beginning! The veil which hides the common abyss, in sight of which
men could not always hold themselves and live, is rent asunder, and he
looks shuddering into it.

Then the image changed, and in its stead, that old familiar image of the
river of Death took possession of him. He stood himself on the brink:
on the other side was Grey and the Squire. But he felt no pang of
separation, of pain; for he himself was just about to cross and join
them! And during a strange brief lull of feeling the mind harbored image
and expectation alike with perfect calm.

Then the fever-spell broke,--the brain cleared,--and he was terribly
himself again. Whence came it--this fresh, inexorable consciousness? He
tried to repel it, to forget himself, to cling blindly, without thought,
to God's love and Catherine's. But the anguish mounted fast. On the one
hand, the fast-growing certainty, urging and penetrating through every
nerve and fibre of the shaken frame; on the other, the ideal fabric of
his efforts and his dreams, the New Jerusalem of a regenerate faith; the
poor, the loving, and the simple walking therein!

'_My God! my God! no time, no future!_'

In his misery, he moved to the uncovered window, and stood looking
through it, seeing and not seeing. Outside, the river, just filmed
with ice, shone under the moon; over it bent the trees, laden with
hoar-frost. Was that a heron, rising for an instant, beyond the bridge,
in the unearthly blue?

And quietly,--heavily,--like an irrevocable sentence, there came,
breathed to him as it were from that winter cold and loneliness, words
that he had read an hour or two before, in the little red book beside
his hand--words in which the gayest of French poets has fixed, as though
by accident, the most traginc of all human cries--

'_Quittez le long espoir et les vastes pensees_.'

He sank on his knees, wrestling with himself and with the bitter longing
for life, and the same words rang through him, deafening every cry but
their own.

'_Quittez,--quittez,--le long espoir et les vastes pensees!_'

CHAPTER LI.

There is little more to tell. The man who had lived so fast was no long
time dying. The eager soul was swift in this as in all else.

The day after Elsmere's return from Murewell, where he left the Squire
still alive (the telegram announcing the death reached Bedford Square