It may be asked what was my object in thus seeking for Helen, when I knew, when I felt that my union with her was impossible--when at the very thought her brother's spirit seemed to rise up before me, and, with the same ghastly look which he had worn in death, bid me forget such hopes for ever. Why did I seek her? No one that has loved will ever ask. I sought her for the bright brief happiness which the presence of the loved still gives, after every expectation is crushed and withered. I sought her with that dreamy sort of lingering with which a mother hangs over the frail clay of her dead child. My hopes were blighted, my happiness was gone; and yet the very object that most nourished my regret was that on which I could look most fondly, and which I sought with the most anxious, most unremitting care. Thus passed my mornings, in fruitless search and continual disappointment. My evenings flew in a different manner, not in studying "_The Sure Way of Winning_," or in practising its precepts, for such a horror had seized me of that hell-invented vice, gaming, and of all that appertains to it, that my first care had been to throw the book I had bought into the fire. The temporary passion which had seized me, I looked upon, and can almost look upon now, as a fit of insanity; for taught as I had been from my infancy to abhor its very name, nothing but absolute madness could have hurried me to a vice at once so degrading and so dangerous--which, as far as regards the mind, is in fact, at best, a combination of avarice and frenzy. I had now bought myself a variety of books on military tactics, and, without any defined purpose in the study, I spent my whole evenings in poring over these treatises of attack and defence--a greater and a nobler species of gambling than that which I had quitted, it is true, but only less mad, inasmuch as it is a game which any one nation can compel another to play, and where those must lose who have not studied to win. I also went occasionally to a hall that an Italian fencer had fitted up in the Rue Pavée for the purpose of turning a high reputation he had acquired in Europe into ready money. Here the room, which was furnished with all sorts of arms offensive and defensive, was well lighted every night, and the assembled company either formed practising parties amongst themselves, or took lessons from the Italian himself, who was one of the most athletic men I ever beheld, and certainly a most complete master of his weapons.