We passed hamlets and villages, and now at last we were nearing Etiolles. I could tell it by the big houses on either side of the road, houses with walled-in gardens and grass lawns, where young ladies played croquet in the long summer afternoons, so that a person on the road could hear the click of the balls and the laughter of the players. The moon had fully risen now, casting her light on the houses, the walls, the vineyards rolling towards the river, the trees and shrubs. Suddenly, as though an adamantine door had been flung across the road barring our way the carriage stopped; one of the horses had fallen as if felled by an axe. The pole was broken. Joubert was on his knees by the head of the fallen horse, dark blood was streaming from its nostrils in the vague moonlight that was now touching the white road. Inexorable Fate. We were two miles from the château gates, but across the fields and through the forest of Senart there away straight as the crow dies to the Pavilion. I do not remember leaving Joubert; suddenly the fields were around me and I was running. My mind driven to madness had matched itself against fate. "I will conquer you," it cried. "No dead fate shall oppose my living will. Let the past be gone. I have sinned, but I have suffered. If she is dead I will fling myself after her and seize her soul in my arms forever." "You are mine--living or dead, you are mine." I must have shouted the words as I ran for I heard the words ringing in my ears. Then fell on me as I ran Delirium, or was it the past. I was in the forest now, the vague light was filled with shapes. A form sprang at me, it was Von Lichtenberg. I struck at it and passed on. The iron man of the bell tower struck at me with his hammer, I seized him and he turned to mist. And now a form was running beside me trying to hold me back, it was Gretel, she tripped me up with her foot. I fell, she vanished and her foot turned to the root of a tree. And the tree turned to Vogel. He passed me as I ran outstripping him, and from the darkness before me now broke a form, it was little Carl. We were in the forest of Lichtenberg, the lake before us. I cried to him to stop. For only answer came the splash of the water, the cry of a child--the gasping of a person drowning in the dark. Death lay in the water. I plunged to meet him and seized a struggling form. But the form was not the form of Death, but the form of a woman living and sweet. A moment later and I would have missed by all eternity the love that had been waiting for me since the beginning of Time. Fate is strong, but the will of man is stronger. CHAPTER XL THE SPIRIT OF EARTH