At first I could not bear to recall the events that had preceded and followed my visit to Krebs that Sunday morning.  My illness had begun that night; on the Monday Tom Peters had come to the Club and insisted upon my being taken to his house....  When I had recovered sufficiently there had been rather a pathetic renewal of our friendship.  Perry came to see me.  Their attitude was one of apprehension not unmixed with wonder; and though they, knew of the existence of a mental crisis, suspected, in all probability, some of the causes of it, they refrained carefully from all comments, contenting themselves with telling me when I was well enough that Krebs had died quite suddenly that Sunday afternoon; that his death—­occurring at such a crucial moment—­had been sufficient to turn the tide of the election and make Edgar Greenhalge mayor.  Thousands who had failed to understand Hermann Krebs, but whom he had nevertheless stirred and troubled, suddenly awoke to the fact that he had had elements of greatness....

My feelings in those first days at Santa Barbara may be likened, indeed, to those of a man who has passed through a terrible accident that has deprived him of sight or hearing, and which he wishes to forget.  What I was most conscious of then was an aching sense of loss—­an ache that by degrees became a throbbing pain as life flowed back into me, re-inflaming once more my being with protest and passion, arousing me to revolt against the fate that had overtaken me.  I even began at moments to feel a fierce desire to go back and take up again the fight from which I had been so strangely removed—­removed by the agency of things still obscure.  I might get Nancy yet, beat down her resistance, overcome her, if only I could be near her and see her.  But even in the midst of these surges of passion I was conscious of the birth of a new force I did not understand, and which I resented, that had arisen to give battle to my passions and desires.  This struggle was not mentally reflected as a debate between right and wrong, as to whether I should or should not be justified in taking Nancy if I could get her:  it seemed as though some new and small yet dogged intruder had forced an entrance into me, an insignificant pigmy who did not hesitate to bar the pathway of the reviving giant of my desires.  These contests sapped my strength.  It seemed as though in my isolation I loved Nancy, I missed her more than ever, and the flavour she gave to life.

Then Hermann Krebs began to press himself on me.  I use the word as expressive of those early resentful feelings,—­I rather pictured him then as the personification of an hostile element in the universe that had brought about my miseries and accomplished my downfall; I attributed the disagreeable thwarting of my impulses to his agency; I did not wish to think of him, for he stood somehow for a vague future I feared to contemplate.  Yet the illusion of his presence, once begun, continued to grow upon me, and I find