He had never been a gross liver or a gross thinker, yet many a sensualist would now have been in a better case than he--for he had always used his quality of spiritual vision--in him so strong as to be almost an added sense--merely to beat back upon and intensify material things. An unbeliever or a man of happy-go-lucky nature could have extracted all the savour possible out of what remained to him of life, and left what was to come on the knees of the gods--Bernardy was too ardent a devotee of life, and life, as he understood it, was a comprehensive term. It meant the training and enjoyment of every faculty, the critical appreciation of everything he met, the absorption of beauty and the production of it. Also he feared the physical act of death as an animal fears it, with a contraction of the muscles and a chilling of the blood--feared it so that sometimes the sweat would break out over his face and he would bite back a cry. Looking back on his life Bernardy could say that it had been good, and he saw for how much more the little things had counted than the big. A sunny day, congenial companions, good wine and tobacco, and, above all, the joy of creation--how well worth while they were. Taken as a whole they outweighed the fondest woman in the world, and that though Bernardy had been a fine lover. Yet it was because of a woman that he was to kill himself three weeks from now, and the fantastic nature of the affair made him feel like a man in a dream. It amused him that it should have been the one conventional period of his life--a couple of months in an English rectory, which had hurled him into such an extravagant situation. The Rector, an avowed eccentric, and strongly influenced by the Byronic wave then at the crest, decided it was his duty to brave society and take notice of his brother's son--especially as the said son was a figure in the literary worlds of Paris and London. The Rector's daughter, Lucy, was sweet and fresh and English, and not in the least clever, and Bernardy, who had never met anyone like her before, fell madly in love. The combination of his passion; of a rival deeply bitten with romanticism and a sense of his own importance and of the high-flown ideas of the period, resulted in a violent quarrel and what was then a favoured species of duel. Bernardy and his rival, telling themselves that they were sparing Lucy the shock of an actual encounter, drew lots to decide which should take his own life. Bernardy had lost, and, leaving the bewildered Lucy to her fantastic roll-collared baronet, retired to spend his two months' grace in his own country of France.