In Hugh's temperament, sensitive and eager as it was, there was a strong tendency to live in the future and in the past rather than in the present. In the past, he realised, he could live without dismay and without languor, because the mind has so extraordinary a power of sifting its memories, of throwing away and disregarding all that is sordid, ugly, and base, and retaining only the finest gold. But there was a danger in dwelling too much upon the future, because the anxious mind, fertile in imagination, was so apt to weave for itself pictures of discouragement and failure, sad dilemmas, dreary dishonours, calamities, shadows, woes. How often had the thought of what might be in store clouded the pure sunshine of some bright day of summer; how often had the thought of isolation, of loss, of bereavement, hung like a cloud between himself and his intercourse even with those whom he most feared to lose! He thought sometimes of that sad and yet bracing sentiment, uttered by one whose life had been filled with every delight that wealth, guided by cultivated taste, could purchase. "My life," said this wearied man, "has been clouded by troubles, most of which never happened." But even apart from the sorrows which he knew might or might not befall him, there was one darkest shadow, the shadow of death, the cessation of beloved energies, of delightful prospects, of the sweet interchange of friendship, of the bright and brave things of life. Could one, he asked himself, ever come to regard death as a natural, a beautiful thing, a delicious resting from life, an appointed goal? It was the one thing certain and inevitable, the last terror, the final silence, which it seemed nothing could break.