I had met my love again only to lose her in that unfathomable sea of plot and mystery. All the dark past, those years of yearning and black bitterness, came back to me. I had thought her dead, and lived with her sweet tender remembrance ever with me. Yet in future I should know that she lived, the wife of an adventurer, suffering a good woman's martyrdom. My heart grew sick with dread and longing. Again I would mourn the dead indeed; dead days, dead love. It pressed upon my life like lead. What beauty now would the daybreak smile on me? What fragrance would the hillside bear for me as I roamed again the face of Europe? I should see the sun for ever through my unshed tears. Around me on the summer earth of Italy or the wintry gloom of the Russian steppe there would be for ever silence. My love had passed beyond me. Unconsciously we moved forward, I still holding her hand and looking into the tearful eyes of her whom I had believed dead. Was it not the perversity of life that snatched her again from me, even though we had met to find that we still loved one another? Yes, it was decreed that I should ever be a cosmopolitan, a wanderer, a mere wayfarer on the great highways of Europe, always filled with longing regrets of the might-have-been. I remembered too well those gay Continental cities wherein I had spent the most recent years of my weary life; cities where feasts and flowers reign, where the golden louis jingle upon the green cloth, where the passionate dark faces of the women glow, where voices pour forth torrents of joyous words, where holiday dresses gleam gaily against the shadows; cities of frolic and brilliancy, of laughter and music, where vice runs riot hand in hand with wealth, and where God is, alas! forgotten. Ah! how nauseous was it all to me. I had lived that life, I had rubbed shoulders with those reckless multitudes, I had laughed amid that sorry masquerade, yet I had shut my eyes to shut out from me the frolic and brilliancy around, and stumbled on, sad, thoughtful, and yet purposeless. The gladness made me colder and wearier as I went. The light and laughter would have driven me homeward in desolation, had I a home to shelter me. But, alas! I was only a wanderer--and alone. "Tell me, darling," I whispered to my love, my heart bursting, "is there absolutely no hope? Can you never free yourself from this man?" "Never," was her despairing response. And in that one single word was my future written upon my heart. I spoke to her again. What I uttered I hardly knew. A flood of fierce, passionate words arose to my lips, and then bending I kissed her--kissed her with that same fierce passion of long ago, when we were both younger, and when we had wandered hand in hand beside the lapping waves at sunset. She did not draw back, but, on the contrary, she kissed me fondly in return. Her thin white hand stroked my brow tenderly, as though she touched a child.