Rivers did not observe the slide of the curtain to the apartment, nor the entrance of Dillon.  He was deeply absorbed in contemplation; his head rested heavily upon his two palms, while his eyes were deeply fixed upon the now opened miniature which he had torn from the neck of Lucy Munro, and which rested before him.  He sighed not—­he spoke not, but ever and anon, as if perfectly unconscious all the while of what he did, he drank from the tumbler of the compounded draught that stood before him, hurriedly and desperately, as if to keep the strong emotion from choking him.  There was in his look a bitter agony of expression, indicating a vexed spirit, now more strongly than ever at work in a way which had, indeed, been one of the primest sources of his miserable life.  It was a spirit ill at rest with itself—­vexed at its own feebleness of execution—­its incapacity to attain and acquire the realization of its own wild and vague conceptions.  His was the ambition of one who discovers at every step that nothing can be known, yet will not give up the unprofitable pursuit, because, even while making the discovery, he still hopes vainly that he may yet, in his own person, give the maxim the lie.  For ever soaring to the sun, he was for ever realizing the fine Grecian fable of Icarus; and the sea of disappointment into which he perpetually fell, with its tumultuous tides and ever-chafing billows, bearing him on from whirlpool to whirlpool, for ever battling and for ever lost.  He was unconscious, as we have said, of the entrance and approach of his lieutenant, and words of bitterness, in soliloquy, fell at brief periods from his lips.—­

“It is after all the best—­” he mused.  “Despair is the true philosophy, since it begets indifference.  Why should I hope?  What prospect is there now, that these eyes, that lip, these many graces, and the imperial pride of that expression, which looks out like a high soul from the heaven that men talk and dream of—­what delusion is there now to bid me hope they ever can be more to me than they are now?  I care not for the world’s ways—­nor feel I now the pang of its scorn and its outlawry; yet I would it were not so, that I might, upon a field as fair as that of the most successful, assert my claim, and woo and win her—­not with those childish notes of commonplace—­that sickly cant of sentimental stuff which I despise, and which I know she despises no less than I.

“Yet, when this field was mine, as I now desire it, what more did it avail me?  Where was the strong sense—­the lofty reason that should then have conquered with an unobstructed force, sweeping all before it, as the flame that rushes through the long grass of the prairies?  Gone—­prostrate—­dumb.  The fierce passion was upward, and my heart was then more an outlaw than I myself am now.