opiate--but still, certainly, pain. As I said before, I was only just beginning to come to myself. My realization of what I had done, of what you had suffered, of what I had made you suffer, had not yet crystallized. My love had not yet waked up. My remorse had not yet got really afire. But all of a sudden, one day, the complete change came. The change was precipitated. “It was a Friday afternoon late in February, a year ago--dark, rainy, warmish. My wife had gone to the rehearsal at Steinway Hall. I had agreed to meet her in the lobby, at the end, and bring her home. All day long, that day, I had done nothing but mope. I had sat at my studio window looking out into the gray, wet park, or up into the heavy, inky clouds, and giving myself over to the blues--thinking that there was the world, full of interests and activities, the same world that I had used to find so pleasant, and in which I had hoped to work and to be of service, the same world quite unaltered; and that yet, somehow, unchanged as it appeared to be, it had changed totally for _me_, had lost all its flavor for me, all its attraction for me; the light, the spirit, had died out of it. I got no pleasure from it. I was of no use in it. I was so much inert, obstructive stuff and lumber. Then, why did I continue to exist? Neither useful nor happy, what excuse for being had I? Why should I not at once be annihilated and done away with? etc., etc. This was the strain that my mind had been running in all day long. Then, toward five o'clock, I put on my hat and walked around to Steinway Hall to wait for Tillie. It was singular, and even now I can not account for it by any ordinary theory, that, as I stood there in the lobby waiting, while the audience, mostly women, passed out, I was conscious of a strange trembling of the heart, such as one feels in anticipation of some momentous event, such as usually accompanies what we call a presentiment--a presentiment that something portentous for our good or for our evil is about to happen. I could not understand it at all. I could not imagine what it was caused by. And yet, notwithstanding, I could not subdue it. It went on from moment to moment getting more intense; troubling me, perplexing me. I concluded that it must be the wind-up and climax of my blues, just as a dull, dark day sometimes winds up and reaches its climax in a thunder-storm. I said to myself, 'You have not felt any thing like this for nearly a year. This is the sort of thing you used to feel when you were in love--after you had rung Christine's door-bell, while you were waiting and chafing for the door to be opened.' Meantime the audience were pouring out past me, laughing, chatting, greeting their acquaintances, putting up their umbrellas; and I was keeping a look-out for my wife. When, all of a sudden, my heart, which had been trembling in the way I have described, all of a sudden it gave a great, terrible leap, and then stood stock still; and I could not