She was not there. She never came to it more. For long I would not realise the truth. I waited, and hoped, and often circumambulated the spot where she had rested, hurrying over a greater or less circumference according to my distance from the centre. I called--I entreated--perhaps in the darkness of night I wept. It was all of no avail. She had vanished without leaving a trace, wilfully and resentfully, and had thus decided to reward my long service of devotion. When--after lingering about the spot for two nights and two days, drugging a dying hope with the philtre of its own brewing--I at length knew myself convicted of despair, a great bitterness awoke in my breast that I should have thus permitted myself to be used and fooled and rejected. “She is not worthy of this vast of concern!” I cried. “I will forget her, and resume myself, and be again the irresponsible maggot contributing to the decay of a worm-eaten system. To taste disenchantment! After all, that is not to drink the sea!” But it was to eat of its fruit of ashes; and I was to carry a burden with me that I might not forego. This in my subsequent wanderings made my steps drag heavily, as if always I bore in the breast of my coat the leaden image of an angel. But, nevertheless, I could muster a pride to my aid in moments of a very desperate lassitude of the soul. * * * * * * * With the opening of October I was still a solitary “rogue,” ostracised from my herded kind. I had wandered so far north as that I saw Paris (the ultimate goal, I felt, of my weary feet) to swim distinguishable in the misty ken of my mind. Therefrom always seemed to emanate a deadly but dulcet atmosphere, the attraction of which must sooner or later overpower me. Sometimes in the night I could have thought I heard the city’s swarming voices jangling to me down the steeper roads of wind; sometimes the keystone of the Conciergerie would figure to me as the lodestone to all shattered barques tossing helplessly on a shoreless waste. For I was sick to the heart of loneliness; sick of the brute evasion of my race; sick of my perilous immunity from all the burning processes of that frantic drama of my times. And so I trudged ever with my face set to the north, and the hum of the witches’ cauldron, whose broth was compound of all heroism and all savagery, singing phantomly in my ears.