are you, needing perhaps some little service: and yet if we were upon different planets, it could not be more impossible for me ever to lift my finger in your aid! Oh, I say, it is infuriating. It is too much. Oh, if I could tear open my breast, and let you look in, and see!--see the love, the remorse, the despair, that are stirring in perpetual fever there.. . . Oh, the misery I caused you! The long, hateful days that you had to drag through afterward, while I was amusing myself, dining out, learning to dance, getting engaged and married! Far and wide, as far as your eye could see, the world, which had been a fair and fragrant garden in your sight, had crumbled suddenly to a bleak waste of dust and ashes. The hand that you loved had dealt you a blow worse than a death-blow. You had entrusted your happiness to me, and I had betrayed my trust; had taken it, and deliberately dashed it to the ground, and shattered it beyond possibility of mending. My frail, beautiful lady. Yes, if I had stabbed you with a knife, I should not have been so brutal, so base, so cruel; your pain would not have been so great; I should have less to reproach myself with to-day. Yes, I know it.” ***** But, the reader may curiously ask, how about his theology? his belief that it had been the act of heaven? This question he touches upon only incidentally, and disposes of briefly: “In the light of my resuscitated love, the mere remembrance of that blasphemous delusion filled me with loathing for myself--made me shudder, and draw back, sickened. It was a monstrous lie. I can not bring myself to write about it.” And on another page, he says: “My superstition was the dragon, whose breath poisoned our joy, withered our world, burned out our hearts. The dragon was killed at last, but too late--after its ravages had been accomplished, after it had done its worst.” I may seize this opportunity, also, to request that if Elias is not always so scrupulous about his syntax and rhetoric as one might wish, the reader will charitably pardon him, in view of the high degree of mental excitement under which he is manifestly laboring. *****