sorrow that he had inconsiderately inflicted upon her.  He condemned himself unsparingly, and said frankly that he had known all the time that he was doing wrong in allowing himself to be carried away by his passion.  “I hoped,” he said, “that it might have been the awakening of a new life in me, and that it would be an initiation for me into the inner life of the world, from which I had always been excluded.”  He went on to say that he would make any sacrifice he could for her happiness—­adding gravely, looking at me with a strange air, that if he thought that she would be the happier if he killed himself, he would not hesitate to do it.  “But live as we are living,” he said, “I cannot.  My life has become a continual and wearing drama, in which I can never be myself, but am condemned to play an unreal part.”

I made him the only answer that was possible—­namely, that I thought that he had undertaken a certain responsibility and that he was bound in honour to fulfil it.  I added that I thought that the whole of his future peace of mind depended upon his rising to the situation, even though it were to be a martyrdom.  I said that I thought, believing as I did in the providential guidance of individual lives, that it was the crisis of his fate; that he had the opportunity of playing a noble part.

“Yes,” he said dispassionately, “if it was the case of a single action of the kind that is usually called heroic, I think I could do it; what I can’t say that I think I am equal to is the making of my life into one long pretence; and what is more, it will not be successful—­I cannot hope to deceive her day after day.”

“Well,” I said, “it is a terrible position; but I think you are bound to make the attempt.”

“Thanks,” he said; “you don’t mind my having asked you?  I thought it would perhaps make things clearer, and I think that on the whole I agree with you.”  He then began to talk of other matters with the utmost calmness.  The sequel is a strange one; what he said to his wife I do not know, but for the few days that I spent with them there was a very different feeling in the air; he had contrived to reassure her, and her anxiety seemed for a time, at all events, to be at an end.  A few days after I left them, the child fell ill, and died within a week.  The shock was too much for the wife, and within a month she followed the child to the grave.  My friend was left alone; and it seemed to me like a ghastly fulfilment of his desires.  I was with him at the funeral of his wife; is it terrible to relate that there was a certain tranquillity about him that suggested the weariness of one off whom a strain had been lifted?  But his own life was to be a short one; about two years after he himself died very suddenly, as he had always desired to die.  I saw him often in the interval; he never recurred to the subject, and I never liked to reopen it.  Only once did he speak to me of her.  “I feel,” he said to me on one