"But a change came: it must have been growing on me for some time without my knowledge. I commonly removed from society when I felt exhaustion coming on me; but on one occasion it chanced that I stayed on in the pleasant company I was in (I was then in Vienna). I did not exactly feel ill; I felt merely weary and languid, and thought that presently I would go to bed. Gradually I began to observe that the looks of my companions were bent strangely on me, and that the expression of their countenances more and more developed surprise and alarm. 'What is the matter with you all?' I demanded; when they instantly cried, 'What is the matter with _you?_ Have you been poisoned?' I rose and went and looked in a mirror; I saw, with ghastly horror, what I was like, and I knew then that I was _doomed_. I fled from that company for ever. I saw that, when the alien life on which I flourished was gone out of me, I was a worn old man--that the Fire of Life which usually burned in my body, making me look bright and young, was now none of it my own; a few hot ashes only were mine, which Death sat cowering by! I could not but sit and gaze at the reflection of the seared ghastliness of that face, which was mine and yet not mine, and feel well-nigh sick unto death. After a while, however, I plucked up heart. I considered that it was impossible this change had come all at once; I must have looked like that--or almost like that--once or twice or oftener before, and yet life and reinvigoration had gone on as they had been wont. I wrapped myself well up, and went out. I found a fit subject. I replenished my life as theretofore; my youthful, fresh appearance returned, and my confidence with it. I refused to look again upon my own, my worn face, from that time until tonight. "But alarm again seized me about a year ago, when I chanced by calculation to note that my periods of abounding life were gradually getting shorter,--that I needed reinvigoration at more frequent intervals;--not that I did not take as much from my subjects as formerly--on the contrary, I seemed to take more--but that I lost more rapidly what I took, as if my body were becoming little better than a fine sieve. The last stage of all was this that you are familiar with, when my subjects began to be so utterly exhausted as to attract public notice. Yet that is not what has given me pause, and made me resolve to bring the whole weary, selfish business to an end. Could I not have gone elsewhere--anywhere, the wide world over--and lived my life? But I was kept, I was tethered here, to this London by a feeling I had never known before. Call it by the common fool's name of Love; call it what you will. I was fascinated by your sister Nora, even as others had been fascinated by me, even as I had been in my youth by the bountiful, gracious beauty of Nature."