that poor lady dead indeed-I mean the lady

you used to love?'

The question went into his heart like a

knife, and with livid face he rose to his feet.

'Do not speak of her!' he cried. ‘I canMiserable

not bear it-it is blasphemy! woman, do you think that you will ever be forgiven for tampering, as you have done, with the terrible truth of death? I came to you in the last despairing hope that among all the phantoms you have conjured up before me there might be some reality; for I was blind and mad, and scarcely knew what I did. If it is any satisfaction to you, know that you have turned the world into a tomb for me, and destroyed my last faint ray of faith in a living God. In my misery, I clung to the thought of your spirit world; and I came to you for

some fresh assurance that such a world might be. All that is over now. It is a cheat and a fraud like all the rest.'

With these words he left her, passing
Directly afterwards

quickly from the room.

she heard the street door close behind him. Tottering to the window, she looked down in the street, and saw him stalk rapidly by, his white face set hard as granite, his eyes looking steadily before him, fixed on vacancy. As he disappeared, she uttered a low cry of pain, and placed her hand upon her heart.

CHAPTER XXXI.

AMONG THE MOUNTAINS.

Give me thy hand, terrestrial; so! Give me thy hand, celestial; so!—Merry Wives of Windsor.

It was the close of a bright sunshiny day in the spring of 18-. The sun was setting crimson on the lonely peak of the Zugspitz in the heart of the Bavarian Highlands, and the shadows of the pine woods which fringed the melancholy gorges beneath were lengthening towards the valleys.

Through one of these mountain gorges, following a rocky footpath, a man was rapidly

walking. He was roughly, almost rudely, dressed in a sort of tourist suit. On his head he wore a broadbrimmed felt hat of the shape frequently worn by clergymen, and in his hand he carried a staff like a shepherd's crook.

Scarcely looking to left or right, but hastening with impatient paces he hurried onward, less like a man hastening to some eagerlysought shelter, than like one flying from some hated thing behind his back. His cheeks were pale and sunken, his eyes wild and sad. From time to time he slackened his speed, and looked wearily around him-up to the desolate sunlit peaks, down the darkening valley with its green pastures, belts of woodland, and fields of growing corn.

But whichever way he looked, he seemed

to find no joy in the prospect, indeed hardly to behold the thing he looked on, but to gaze through it and beyond it on some sorrowful portent.

Sometimes where the path became unusually steep and dangerous, he sprang from rock to rock with reckless haste, or when its thread was broken, as frequently happened by some brawling mountain stream, he entered the torrent without hesitation, and passed recklessly across. Indeed, the man seemed utterly indifferent to physical conditions, but labouring rather under some spiritual possession, completely and literally realising in his person the words of the poet :

His own mind did like a tempest strong

Come to him thus, and drave the weary wight along.

The wild scene was in complete harmony