Almost every letter ended by urging me, in order to flee from my sorrows, to travel!  With the typical John Bull travelling seems to be always the panacea.  In sorrow, John’s herald of peace is Baedeker:  the dispenser of John’s true nepenthe is Mr. Murray.  Pity and love for Winifred pursued me, tortured me nigh unto death, and therefore did these friends of mine seem to suppose that I wanted to flee from my pity and sorrow!  Why, to flee from my sorrow, to get free of my pity, to flee from the agonies that went nigh to tearing soul from body, would have been to flee from all that I had left of life—­memory.

Did I want to flee from Winnie?  Why, memory was Winnie now; and did I want to flee from her?  And yet it was memory that was goading me on to the verge of madness.  No doubt the reader thinks me a weak creature for allowing the passion of pity to sap my manhood in this fashion.  But it was not so much her death as the manner of her death that withered my heart and darkened my soul.  The calamities which fell upon her, grievous beyond measure, unparalleled, not to be thought of save with a pallor of cheek and a shudder of the flesh, were ever before me, mocking me—­maddening me.

‘Died in a hovel!’ As I gave voice to this impeachment of Heaven, night after night, wandering up and down the streets, my brain was being scorched and withered by those same thoughts of anger against destiny and most awful revolt which had appalled me when first I saw how the curse of Heaven or the whim of Circumstance had been fulfilled.

Then came that passionate yearning for death, which grief such as mine must needs bring.  But if what Materialism teaches were true, suicide would rob me even of my memory of her.  If, on the other hand, what I had been taught by the supernaturalism of my ancestors were true, to commit suicide might be but to play finally into the hands of that same unknown pitiless power with whom my love had all along been striving.

‘Suicide might sever my soul from hers for ever.’  I said, and then the tragedy would seem too monstrously unjust to be true, and I said:  ’It cannot be—­such things cannot be:  it is a hideous dream.  She is not dead!  She is in Wales with friends at Carnarvon, and I shall awake and laugh at all this imaginary woe!’

And what were now my feelings towards the memory of my father?  Can a man cherish in his heart at one and the same moment scorn of another man for believing in the efficacy of a curse, and bitter anger against him for having left a curse behind him?  He can!  On my return to London after my illness I had sent back to Wilderspin the copy of The Veiled Queen he had lent me.  But from the library of Raxton Hall I brought my father’s own copy, elaborately bound in the tooled black calf my father affected.  The very sight of that black binding now irritated me; never did I pass it without experiencing a sensation that seemed a blending of scorn and fear:  scorn of the ancestral superstitions the book gave voice to:  fear of them.