Rising from his seat, he paced the room. A strange and solemn heaviness weighed upon him, and he yearned for the morrow. With the sense of the night, the deep hush of the air, the shadowy quiet of the room, the brooding sentience of the ghostly hour, was mingled a vague, dark, unimaginable portent which hung like lead upon his soul. Pausing in his silent walk, he leaned his head upon his hand, alone in the vast, haunted solitude of his being, and longing to be at rest. Musing on and on, a fleeting gleam of peace, like a ray shining through clouds over a waste of midnight desolation, stole upon his hour of lonely weakness, as across his mind floated the image of Muriel sleeping—her lily face composed to rest in its nimbus of bright hair, and sweet with happy dreams. So had he seen her in her light slumber that day. It came into his mind as he mused—how she had leaped up from her graceful rest, with what ethereal summer lightning of a smile on her awakened face, with what delicious laughter and what gay replies. Her words—‘you are the fairy prince that awakened me, and now I am to follow you through all the world.’ He looked up with a throbbing brain. The dream of love was dissolved; henceforth it could never agitate his heart: now he was wholly and only mankind’s—Oh, mockery of mockeries! In the dead stillness there was the sense of mighty pulses madly beating, and the air was flame. All his being rose like the torrent surge and thunder of a heaven-drowning sea, and for one fierce instant the world of life quivered through and through with agony. He gazed before him with tense and burning eyes. A faint radiance cast from the funnel of his lamp, lit the kingly-fronted statue of Verulam on its pedestal. The light lay lucid on the vast and sovereign brow, melting into fainter light below, and the face was as the face of a god rapt in the white peace of Eternity. It grew upon the convulsing storm of his passion with a diffusive calm. Slowly, as he brooded upon the august countenance, tranquil in massive majesty, its sweet serenity, its passionless and regal peace sank upon him: a sad and gentle inflowing tide of feeling lifted him above his agitations, till at length, with clasped hands and bowed head, and all the tempest of his spirit dying down in streaming tears, he rose into communion with the man whose life on earth began new ages. No words breathed from his lips, no thoughts came to his mind, but in the ideal presence of the soul he loved, raptures of solemn comfort arose within him, and he became composed. A load seemed to lift from his spirit, and turning away, relieved and exalted, he sank into his former seat, and sat in tranquil musing as the moon was going down. CHAPTER XVII. NOCTURNAL.