I would not be thought to have fallen to this all but bottomless depth only because I had lost Mary. Still less was it because of the fact that in her, around whom had gathered all the devotion with which the man in me could regard woman, I had lost all womankind. It was _the loss_ of Mary, as I then judged it, not, I repeat, the fact that _I_ had lost her. It was that she had lost herself. Thence it was, I say, that I lost my hope in God. For, if there were a God, how could he let purity be clasped in the arms of defilement? how could he marry my Athanasia--not to a corpse, but to a Plague? Here was the man who had done more to ruin her brother than any but her father, and God had given her to _him!_ I had had--with the commonest of men--some notion of womanly purity--how was it that hers had not instinctively shuddered and shrunk? how was it that the life of it had not taken refuge with death to shun bare contact with the coarse impurity of such a nature as that of Geoffrey Brotherton? My dreams had been dreams indeed! Was my Athanasia dead, or had she never been? In my thought, she had ‘said to Corruption, Thou art my father; to the worm, Thou art my mother and my sister.’ Who should henceforth say of any woman that she was impure? She _might_ love him--true; but what was she then who was able to love such a man? It was this that stormed the citadel of my hope, and drove me from even thinking of a God. Gladly would I now have welcomed any bodily suffering that could hide me from myself; but no illness came. I was a living pain, a conscious ill-being. In a thousand forms those questions would ever recur, but without hope of answer. When I fell asleep from exhaustion, hideous visions of her with Geoffrey would start me up with a great cry, sometimes with a curse on my lips. Nor were they the most horrible of those dreams in which she would help him to mock me. Once, and only once, I found myself dreaming the dream of _that_ night, and I knew that I had dreamed it before. Through palace and chapel and charnel-house, I followed her, ever with a dim sense of awful result; and when at the last she lifted the shining veil, instead of the face of Athanasia, the bare teeth of a skull grinned at me from under a spotted shroud, through which the sunlight shone from behind, revealing all its horrors. I was not mad--my reason had not given way: _how_ remains a marvel. CHAPTER LIX. THE DAWN.