The shock overwhelmed me. Not only was she taken from me at the very instant of discovery and possession, but all hope of mutual explanation was extinguished forever. Upon one point alone had I arrived at certainty, but that only rendered me more anxious to clear up the rest. I had seen her living, had spoken to her, and heard her voice; and now she was dead, the proof of her actual humanity was palpable. It was some comfort to know that she to whom I had dedicated myself under the influence of a sort of sorcery, was a being actuated by passions like my own, and subject to the same natural laws; but it was the extremity of all conceivable wretchedness to lose her just as I had acquired this consoling knowledge. The phantom had scarcely become a reality when it again faded into a phantom. A few days afterward, for the second time, I followed a hearse to the grave. The only persons to whom I had consecrated my love were gone; and this last bereavement seemed to me at the time as if it were final, and as if there was nothing left for me but to die. My reason, however, had gained some strength by my rough intercourse with the world; and even in the midst of the desolation of that melancholy scene I felt as if a burden had been taken off my mind, and I had been released from a harassing obligation. At all events I had a consciousness, that as the earth closed over the coffin of Gertrude, I passed out of the region of dreams and deceptions, and that whatever lay in advance of me, for good or evil, was of the actual, toiling, practical world. The exodus of my delusion seemed to open to me a future, in which imagination would be rebuked by the presence of stern and harsh realities. I felt like a manumitted slave, who goes forth reluctantly to the hard work of freedom, and would gladly fall back, if he could, upon the supine repose which had spared him the trouble of thinking for himself. Forrester bore his agony with heroic endurance. I, who knew what was in his heart, knew what he suffered. But his eyes were still and his lips were fixed, and not a single quiver of his pulses betrayed his anguish to the bystanders. When the last rites were over, and we turned away, he wrung my hand without a word of leave-taking, and departed. A few days afterward he left England. The associations connected with the scenes of his past life--with the country that contained the ashes of all he loved--embittered every hour of his life, and he wisely sought relief in exile. I was hurt at not having received some communication from him before he went away; but I knew he was subject to fits of heavy depression, and his silence, although it pained me at the time, did not diminish the respect and sympathy inspired by his conduct.