with marked respect, now regarded him with sullen dislike and suspicion. They could not prevent him, however, from following as chief when the day of the funeral

mourner,

came.

That funeral was a dismal enough experience for Ambrose Bradley. Never before had he felt so keenly the vanity of his own creed and the isolation of his own opinions, as when he stood by the graveside and listened to the last solemn words of the English burial service. He seemed like a black shadow in the sacred place. The words of promise and resurrection had little meaning for one who had come to regard the promise as only beautiful 'poetry,' and the resurrection as only a poet's dream. And though the sense of his own sin lay on his heart like lead, he saw no

benign Presence blessing the miserable woman

who had departed, upraising her on wings of gladness; all he perceived was Death's infinite desolation, and the blackness of that open

grave.

95

CHAPTER XXVII

THE SIREN.

Weave a circle round him thrice.

For he on honey-dew hath fed,]

And drunk the milk of Paradise.-Kubla Khan.

BRADLEY'S first impulse, on quitting Boulogne, was to hasten at once on to Italy, seek out Alma, and tell her all that had occurred; but that impulse was no sooner felt than it was conquered. The man had a quickening conscience left, and he could not have stood just then before the woman he loved without the bitterest pain and humiliation. No, he would write to her, he would break the news gently

by letter, not by word of mouth; and afterwards, perhaps, when his sense of spiritual agony had somewhat worn away, he would go to her and throw himself upon her tender mercy. So instead of flying on to Italy he returned by the mail to London, and thence wrote at length to Alma, giving her full details of his wife's death.

By this time the man was so broken in spirit and so changed in body, that even his worst enemies might have pitied him. The trouble of the last few months had stript him of all his intellectual pride, and left him supremely sad.

But now, as ever, the mind of the man, though its light was clouded, turned in the direction of celestial or supermundane things. Readers who are differently constituted, and

who regard such speculations as trivial or irrelevant, will doubtless have some difficuity in comprehending an individual who, through all vicissitudes of moral experience, invariably returned to the one set purpose of spiritual inquiry. To him one thing was paramount, even over all his own sorrows-the solution of the great problem of human life and immortality. This was his haunting idea, his monomania, so to speak. Just as a physiologist would examine his own blood under the microscope, just as a scientific inquirer would sacrifice his own life and happiness for the verification of a theory, so would Bradley ask himself, even when on the rack of moral torment, How far does this suffering help me to a solution of the mystery of life?

True, for a time he had been indifferent,

VOL. III.

H