emotions, with an anguish of remorse and love--oh, my sweet, injured lady beautiful, frail Christine!--and now, now when I try to give you some faint idea of it, I am as helpless to do so, as if I were trying to scream out in a nightmare, and my voice failed me, and my tongue clove to the roof of my mouth. What if I had trampled down all conventional restraints, and then and there, in spite of the crowd, in spite of every thing, had rushed forward and stopped you, and thrown myself upon the ground before you, abasing myself at your feet, and just moaned out loud--letting it all burst forth in one good, deep, satisfying sob? My heart throbs hard at the thought. Yet, of course, I had no right to do it. If I had done it, I should only have relieved myself, at the cost of paining you--you whom, God knows, I have already pained enough.. . . Oh, well, I must try to do my best with pen and ink. Well, as I say, I stood there, breathing heavily, at last, after many months of death, at last alive, I stood there like that, when--when my wife came up, and took my arm, and demanded, startled by my appearance, what the matter was. My wife! And I had just seen you; and my soul was full of you, you whom I had wronged and lost! And here was my wife, taking my arm, speaking to me, emphasizing the antithesis. The past and the present! What I had given up, and what I had got in place of it! After my glimpse of you, the reality--Tillie! Oh, it was as though a starving man had just seen bread, smelled meat, and then, looking into his own hand, had found a stone there. She took my arm; and I turned her question as best I could; and I led her home. Conceive how, as I walked home from Steinway Hall this Friday afternoon, the ghost of a certain other Friday afternoon bore me company. One Friday afternoon, only a little more than a year earlier, in December, 1882, you had gone with me there, to hear the _Damnation of Faust_. Do you remember? You had sat at my side, close at my side. You had looked into my eyes, had touched my arm, had spoken to me. The sweetness of the rose that you wore in your bosom, had filled my nostrils. For one instant, one delirious instant, your breath, your very breath, had fallen upon my cheek! You had allowed me to wrap you in your cloak, when you felt a draught--in the fur circular you used to wear; I remember the faint perfume that always clung to it. We were so intimate, so confidential, you and I! You were happy. And I loved you; and I had the possibility of winning your love open before me. And now! God, to think that the possibility which that afternoon held safe in store for me, had been used and wasted! To think that by no remaining possibility it could ever be won back! Every thing was destroyed. I myself, by my own voluntary act, had destroyed every thing--even hope. Well, well, my wife and I walked home. My brain and my heart were burning. Chaos was let loose in them. I wanted to scream out, to beat my breast, to rend my garments.