Fire of Life which usually burned in my body, making me look bright and young, was now none of it my own; a few hot ashes only were mine, which Death sat cowering by!  I could not but sit and gaze at the reflection of the seared ghastliness of that face, which was mine and yet not mine, and feel well-nigh sick unto death.  After a while, however, I plucked up heart.  I considered that it was impossible this change had come all at once; I must have looked like that—­or almost like that—­once or twice or oftener before, and yet life and reinvigoration had gone on as they had been wont.  I wrapped myself well up, and went out.  I found a fit subject.  I replenished my life as theretofore; my youthful, fresh appearance returned, and my confidence with it.  I refused to look again upon my own, my worn face, from that time until tonight.

“But alarm again seized me about a year ago, when I chanced by calculation to note that my periods of abounding life were gradually getting shorter,—­that I needed reinvigoration at more frequent intervals;—­not that I did not take as much from my subjects as formerly—­on the contrary, I seemed to take more—­but that I lost more rapidly what I took, as if my body were becoming little better than a fine sieve.  The last stage of all was this that you are familiar with, when my subjects began to be so utterly exhausted as to attract public notice.  Yet that is not what has given me pause, and made me resolve to bring the whole weary, selfish business to an end.  Could I not have gone elsewhere—­anywhere, the wide world over—­and lived my life?  But I was kept, I was tethered here, to this London by a feeling I had never known before.  Call it by the common fool’s name of Love; call it what you will.  I was fascinated by your sister Nora, even as others had been fascinated by me, even as I had been in my youth by the bountiful, gracious beauty of Nature.”

“I have wanted to ask you,” said Lefevre, “for an explanation of your conduct towards Nora.  Why did you—­with your awful life—­life which, as you say, was not your own, and your extraordinary secret—­why did you remain near her, and entangle her with your fascinations?  What did you desire?—­what did you hope for?”

“I scarcely know for what I hoped.  But let me speak of her; for she has traversed and completely eclipsed my former vision of Nature.  I have told you what my point of view was,—­alone in the midst of Nature.  I was for myself the only consciousness in the world, and all the world besides was merely a variety of material and impression, to be observed and known, to be interested in and delighted with.  I was thus lonely, lonely as a despot, when Nora, your sister, appeared to me, and instantly I became aware there was another consciousness in the world as great as, or greater than, my own,—­another person than myself, a person of supreme beauty and intelligence and faculty.  She became to me all that Nature had been, and more.  She expressed