That course of our life which I have indicated in a few sentences filled the space of years.  So much misery—­so slow and hideous a growth of hatred and sin, may be compressed into a sentence!  And men judge of each other’s lives through this summary medium.  They epitomize the experience of their fellow-mortal, and pronounce judgment on him in neat syntax, and feel themselves wise and virtuous—­conquerors over the temptations they define in well-selected predicates.  Seven years of wretchedness glide glibly over the lips of the man who has never counted them out in moments of chill disappointment, of head and heart throbbings, of dread and vain wrestling, of remorse and despair.  We learn words by rote, but not their meaning; that must be paid for with our life-blood, and printed in the subtle fibres of our nerves.

But I will hasten to finish my story.  Brevity is justified at once to those who readily understand, and to those who will never understand.

Some years after my father’s death, I was sitting by the dim firelight in my library one January evening—­sitting in the leather chair that used to be my father’s—­when Bertha appeared at the door, with a candle in her hand, and advanced towards me.  I knew the ball-dress she had on—­the white ball-dress, with the green jewels, shone upon by the light of the wax candle which lit up the medallion of the dying Cleopatra on the mantelpiece.  Why did she come to me before going out?  I had not seen her in the library, which was my habitual place for months.  Why did she stand before me with the candle in her hand, with her cruel contemptuous eyes fixed on me, and the glittering serpent, like a familiar demon, on her breast?  For a moment I thought this fulfilment of my vision at Vienna marked some dreadful crisis in my fate, but I saw nothing in Bertha’s mind, as she stood before me, except scorn for the look of overwhelming misery with which I sat before her . . .  “Fool, idiot, why don’t you kill yourself, then?”—­that was her thought.  But at length her thoughts reverted to her errand, and she spoke aloud.  The apparently indifferent nature of the errand seemed to make a ridiculous anticlimax to my prevision and my agitation.

“I have had to hire a new maid.  Fletcher is going to be married, and she wants me to ask you to let her husband have the public-house and farm at Molton.  I wish him to have it.  You must give the promise now, because Fletcher is going to-morrow morning—­and quickly, because I’m in a hurry.”

“Very well; you may promise her,” I said, indifferently, and Bertha swept out of the library again.