There was his bad health to begin with. How could he ever satisfy any one, any more than that Guy Waynflete whose face, whose constitution, and doubtless whose soul he inherited? That Guy who _drank_? Who ever overcame that impulse, which seemed no more moral or immoral than the palpitation of his heart? Probably, after all, the cynical common-sense view of that Guy's miserable failure was the true one. The Dragon, the little public-house which must be passed close by the river might account for it better than highwayman or ghost. Perhaps he, too, had been tired and ill, and had stopped there to get strength to go on--and had not gone on in time. And the Dragon was there still in the same place. The turn to it must still be passed on the way to the bridge. And as for the ghost? Was that, too, an hereditary affection of the nerves, a monomania; in fact, just that dislocation of the brain which made both him and his ancestor irresponsible for their actions, a sign that showed that they were not free agents, that the dreadful and degrading fate that had overtaken his namesake was equally inevitable for himself? Yes. The Being that haunted him and controlled him was nothing but Himself, and his "objectivity" only the chimera of an abnormal brain. He looked, and behold there was nothing, no voice, nor any to answer. This awful conviction was more terrible to Guy than any haunting ancestral spirit, than any tempting fiend. It was possible to fight with "principalities and powers, rulers of darkness;" but to wait helpless for the inevitable outcome of his _Self_, to see drunkenness, degradation and madness unroll before him--to know, not that he would lose his soul, but that he had no soul to lose; no foe to fight with--no friend to help. For, if this dreadful sense of an evil presence within him which grew and darkened as he came down the rough field to the river's side, was only a bogie of his imagination, then no heavenly presence could be real either, if the only spiritual experience that he had ever, as he called it, "felt," was a delusion, he could not believe that any other could be real. But, in the horror of these thoughts, he passed the turn that would have led him to the respite and relief of the Dragon public, and never knew the moment when he did so. He came to the riverside. The water was deep enough here for drowning, for making an end both of the past and of the future, a fit end for the fool who lived in dread of his own fancy, and feared--_himself_. Well, he was not frightened now, only desperate, which was a worse thing.