Here, in fact, was the goading stab in his side--the wound that sometimes so stung and rankled that almost he was tempted to have out madame la gouvernante’s letter to her employer and resolve dishonourably his doubts. Through the anguish of these, the piercing tooth of the recent horror sprung upon him might make itself felt only as a pain within the pain--a lesser torture, the nature of which he would occasionally seek to analyse in order to a temporary forgetfulness of the greater. Then, thinking of the holy maid of Méricourt, he would cry in his soul, “What is this gift of imagination but a Promethean fire, destroying whoever is informed with it! Better my system of a mechanical world with passion all eliminated!”--and he would think of how he had been once curiously interested in a poor lodge-keeper’s dreamings, a faculty for which had been then to him so strange an anomaly. And was it so still--to him who had learned, through love, to attune his ear to the under harmonics in every wind that blew upon the earth? Perhaps, in truth, it was this very gift of imagination that, in greater or less degree, was responsible for the irregularities one and all that misconverted the plain uses of life; that made the picturesqueness of existence, and its glory and tragedy. And would he at this very last be without it? And was not its possession--a common one now to him and Nicette--the stimulus to unnatural deeds that were the outcome of supernatural thoughts? He had at least the temptation to commit an act that would be an outrage on his traditional sense of honour. He would resist the temptation, because he _had_ the tradition. But conceive this Nicette, perhaps with no traditions, and with an imagination infinitely more vivid than his. What limit was to put to her foreseeings; how should the normal-sighted adjudge her monstrous for anticipating conclusions to which their vision could by no means penetrate? He would catch himself away from the train of thought, the indulgence of which seemed a certain condonation of a deed that his every instinct abhorred. Yet his mind took, perhaps, something the tone of the intricate close places in which it wandered; and now and again a little thrill would run through him of half-sensuous pity for the poor misguided soul that, by offering up its honour at the very shrine at which his worshipped, had only estranged what it would have fain conciliated. * * * * * * * *