Yet all the while I wove it, I knew that this texture of dreams must soon be drawn aside, and like the curtain in the tragedy reveal at last the horror concealed within. Such brooding was but the deception of a reluctant spirit dallying and delaying with any trifle by the way to put off the arrival at the hill of evil prospect. At last I learned the lesson of this abrupt ending to the dream at the point of full disillusion; it forced itself upon me with the power of an oracular utterance warning me to cease my palterings with fate. My reason now rebuked me like a stern judge, dissecting all false pleas and laying bare their weakness. What right had I, now knowing myself incurable, even to dream of easing my own pain by darkening and despoiling a second life? The love of solitude was now more to me than even the love of a wife; it would surely come between us like a strange woman, and fill a pure heart with bitterness. No smiling hopes of a possible redemption could annul the immutable decree, and if I disobeyed the warning, guilt as well as misery would be mine; for he is pitiful indeed who only weds that his wife may suck the poison from his wounds. If I married I should stand for ever condemned of an unutterable meanness. So I dispelled my dreams and looked reality in the face.
It was a dismal prospect that lay before me. Until then the future had held its possible secrets, its imaginable revelations of change, which, like the luminous suggestions in dark clouds, allured with a promise of a brief and penetrable gloom. In my darkest hours I had lulled fear by the thought of a haply interposing Providence, and drifted on from day to aimless day nursing the hope of some miraculous release upon the very steps of the scaffold. But now I was twice fallen; and as a man abandoned by the last illusion of deliverance calls ruin to him, and in the new leisure of despair calmly scans the features at which but now he dared not glance, so I saw as in a hard grey light the true outlines of my destiny. The wreathing mist, the profound soft shadows, the clouds with their promise of mutability, were now all gone, leaving the bare framework of a world arid and severe as a lunar landscape.
