I should have no qualms about tightening the rope round the neck of some human monster, or sticking a neat dagger or bullet into a dangerous, treacherous foe, but to kill a dream is a sickening business. It goes on moaning in such a heart-breaking fashion, and you never know when it is dead. All on a sudden some night it will come wailing in the wind outside your window, and you must blacken your heart and harden your face with another strangling grip of its slim appealing throat, another blow upon its angel eyes. Even then it will recover, and you will go on being a murderer, making for yourself day by day a murderer's face, without the satisfaction of having really murdered. But what of Nicolete? do you exclaim. Have you no thought for her, bleeding her heart away in solitude? Can you so soon forget those appealing eyes? Yes, I have thought for her. Would God that I could bear for her those growing pains of the heart! and I shall never forget those farewell eyes. But then, you see, I had firmly realised this, that she would sooner recover from our separation than from our marriage; that her love for me, pretty and poignant and dramatic while it lasted, was a book-born, book-fed dream, which must die soon or late,--the sooner the better for the peace of the dreams that in the course of nature would soon spring up to take its place. But while I realised all this, and, with a veritable aching of the heart at the loss of her, felt a curious satisfaction at the turn of events, still my own psychology became all the more a puzzle to me, and I asked myself, with some impatience, what I would be at, and what it was I really wanted. Here had I but a few moments ago been holding in my hands the very dream I had set out to find, and here was I secretly rejoicing to be robbed of it! If Nicolete did not fulfil the conditions of that mystical Golden Girl, in professed search for whom I had set out that spring morning, well, the good genius of my pilgrimage felt it time to resign. Better give it up at once, and go back to my books and my bachelorhood, if I were so difficult to please. No wonder my kind providence felt provoked. It had provided me with the sweetest pink-and-porcelain dream of a girl, and might reasonably have concluded that his labours on my behalf were at an end.