But, without this further revelation, Philip sat staring at the ground as if he were overwhelmed; and what hurt him so deeply was less the painful sense of having been cheated by such coarse cunning, than the annihilation of the treasured hopes which he had founded on the experiences of the past night.  He felt as though a brutal foot had trampled down the promise of future joys on which he had counted; his sister’s revelations had spoiled not merely his life on earth, but all eternity beyond the grave.  Where hope ends despair steps in; and Philip, with reckless vehemence, flung himself, as it were, into its arms.  His was an excitable nature; he had never thought of any one but himself, but labored with egotistical zeal to cultivate his own mind and outdo his fellows in the competition for learning.  The sullen words in which he called himself the most wretched man on earth, and the victim of the blackest ill-fortune, fell from his lips like stones.  He rudely repelled his sister’s encouraging words, like a sick child whose pain is the greater for being pitied, till at last she appealed to his sense of duty, reminding him that something must be done to rescue her father and Alexander.

“They also!  They also!” he cried.  “It falls on us all.  Blind Fate drives us all, innocent as we are, to death and despair, like the Tantalides.  What sin have you committed, gentle, patient child; or our father, or our happy-hearted and gifted brother; or I—­I myself?  Have those whom we call the rulers of the universe the right to punish me because I make use of the inquiring spirit they have bestowed on me?  Ah, and how well they know how to torture us!  They hate me for my learning, and so they turn my little errors to account to allow me to be cheated like a fool!  They are said to be just, and they behave like a father who disinherits his son because, as a man, he notes his parent’s weakness.  With tears and anguish have I striven for truth and knowledge.  There is not a province of thought whose deepest depths I have not tried to fathom; and when I recognized that it is not given to mortals to apprehend the essence of the divinity because the organs bestowed on us are too small and feeble; when I refused to pronounce whether that which I can not apprehend exists or not, was that my fault, or theirs?  There may be divine forces which created and govern the universe; but never talk to me of their goodness, and reasonableness, and care for human creatures!  Can a reasonable being, who cares for the happiness of another, strew the place assigned to him to dwell in with snares and traps, or implant in his breast a hundred impulses of which the gratification only drags him into an abyss?  Is that Being my friend, who suffers me to be born and to grow up, and leaves me tied to the martyr’s stake, with very few real joys, and finally kills me, innocent or guilty, as surely as I am born?  If the divinity which is supposed to bestow on us a portion of the divine essence in the form of reason