Still, the strange instinct of never losing hold of her, influenced me.  I followed, staggering like a drunken man.  In a moment, she was out of my reach; in another, out of my sight.  I went on, nevertheless; on, and on, and on, I knew not whither.  I lost all ideas of time and distance.  Sometimes I went round and round the same streets, over and over again.  Sometimes I hurried in one direction, straight forward.  Wherever I went, it seemed to me that she was still just before; that her track and my track were one; that I had just lost my hold of her, and that she was just starting on her flight.

I remember passing two men in this way, in some great thoroughfare.  They both stopped, turned, and walked a few steps after me.  One laughed at me, as a drunkard.  The other, in serious tones, told him to be silent; for I was not drunk, but mad—­he had seen my face as I passed under a gas-lamp, and he knew that I was mad.

“MAD!”—­that word, as I heard it, rang after me like a voice of judgment.  “MAD!”—­a fear had come over me, which, in all its frightful complication, was expressed by that one word—­a fear which, to the man who suffers it, is worse even than the fear of death; which no human language ever has conveyed, or ever will convey, in all its horrible reality, to others.  I had pressed onward, hitherto, because I saw a vision that led me after it—­a beckoning shadow, ahead, darker even than the night darkness.  I still pressed on, now; but only because I was afraid to stop.

I know not how far I had gone, when my strength utterly failed me, and I sank down helpless, in a lonely place where the houses were few and scattered, and trees and fields were dimly discernible in the obscurity beyond.  I hid my face in my hands, and tried to assure myself that I was still in possession of my senses.  I strove hard to separate my thoughts; to distinguish between my recollections; to extricate from the confusion within me any one idea, no matter what—­and I could not do it.  In that awful struggle for the mastery over my own mind, all that had passed, all the horror of that horrible night, became as nothing to me.  I raised myself, and looked up again, and tried to steady my reason by the simplest means—­even by endeavouring to count all the houses within sight.  The darkness bewildered me.  Darkness?—­Was it dark? or was day breaking yonder, far away in the murky eastern sky?  Did I know what I saw?  Did I see the same thing for a few moments together?  What was this under me?  Grass? yes! cold, soft, dewy grass.  I bent down my forehead upon it, and tried, for the last time, to steady my faculties by praying; tried if I could utter the prayer which I had known and repeated every day from childhood—­the Lord’s Prayer.  The Divine Words came not at my call—­no! not one of them, from the beginning to the end!  I started up on my knees.  A blaze of lurid sunshine flashed before my eyes; a hell-blaze of brightness, with fiends by millions, raining down out of it on my head; then a rayless darkness—­the darkness of the blind—­then God’s mercy at last—­the mercy of utter oblivion.