I cannot now trace the slow or swift flitting by of phantasmal events, ... wild ghosts of days or weeks that drifted past, and brought me gradually and finally to a time when I found myself wandering, numb and stricken and sick at heart, by the shores of a lake in Switzerland,--a small lake, densely blue, with apparently a thought in its depths such as is reflected in a child's earnest eye. I gazed down at the clear and glistening water almost unseeingly,--the snow-peaked mountains surrounding it were too high for the lifting of my aching sight,--loftiness, purity, and radiance were unbearable to my mind, crushed as it was beneath a weight of dismal wreckage and ruin. What a fool was I ever to have believed that in this world there could be such a thing as happiness! Misery stared me in the face,--life-long misery,--and no escape but death. Misery!--it was the word which like a hellish groan, had been uttered by the three dreadful phantoms that had once, in an evil vision, disturbed my rest. What had I done, I demanded indignantly of myself, to deserve this wretchedness which no wealth could cure?--why was fate so unjust? Like all my kind, I was unable to discern the small yet strong links of the chain I had myself wrought, and which bound me to my own undoing,--I blamed fate, or rather God,--and talked of injustice, merely because _I_ personally suffered, never realizing that what I considered unjust was but the equitable measuring forth of that Eternal Law which is carried out with as mathematical an exactitude as the movement of the planets, notwithstanding man's pigmy efforts to impede its fulfilment. The light wind blowing down from the snow peaks above me ruffled the placidity of the little lake by which I aimlessly strolled,--I watched the tiny ripples break over its surface like the lines of laughter on a human face, and wondered morosely whether it was deep enough to drown in! For what was the use of living on,--knowing what I knew! Knowing that she whom I had loved, and whom I loved still in a way that was hateful to myself, was a thing viler and more shameless in character than the veriest poor drab of the street who sells herself for current coin,--that the lovely body and angel-face were but an attractive disguise for the soul of a harpy,--a vulture of vice, ... my God!--an irrepressible cry escaped me as my thoughts went on and on in the never-ending circle and problem of incurable, unspeakable despair,--and I threw myself down on a shelving bank of grass that sloped towards the lake and covered my face in a paroxysm of tearless agony.