Now stop talking, mother, I am going." "God bless you, my darling boy--you have never failed me." Instead of appeasing his conscience, the remark completed his descent into the state of disenchantment he had been approaching for hours.

The shock of his mother's illness, coming after three days of marriage, had been too much for his unstable equilibrium, and he felt smothered by an oppression which, in some strange way, seemed closing upon him from without.

It was in the air--in the faded cretonne of the room, in the grey flashes of the swallows from the eaves of the house, in the leafless boughs etched delicately against the orange light of the sky.

Like most adventurers of the emotions, he was given to swift despondencies as well as to vivid elations, and the tyranny of a mood was usually as absolute as it was brief.

The fact was there while it lasted like the physical sensation of hunger or gratification.