I did not speak as we drove through the deserted streets, for my mind was curiously empty of familiar thoughts and experiences; it seemed to have been plucked out of the definite world and cast naked upon a shoreless sea. There were moments when the vision appeared on the point of returning, and I would half?remember, with aasy of joy or sorrow, crimes and heroisms, fortunes and misfortunes; in to plate, with a sudden leaping of the heart, hopes and terrors, desires and ambitions, alien to my orderly and careful life; and then I would awake shuddering at the thought that some great imponderable being had swept through my mind. It was indeed days before this feeling passed perfectly away, and even now, when I have sought refuge in the only definite faith, I feel a great tolerance for those people with i personalities, who gather in the chapels aing?places of certain obscure sects, because I also have felt fixed habits and principles dissolving before a power, which was hysterica passio or sheer madness, if you will, but was so powerful in its melancholy exultation that I tremble lest it wake again and drive me from my new?found peace.
When we came in the grey light to the great half?empty terminus, it seemed to me I was so ged that I was no more, as man is, a moment shuddering at eternity, but eternity weeping and laughing over a moment; and when we had started and Michael Robartes had fallen asleep, as he soon did, his sleeping face, in which there was no sign of all that had so shaken me and that now kept me wakeful, was to my excited mind more like a mask than a face. The fancy possessed me that the man behind it had dissolved away like salt in water, and that it laughed and sighed, appealed and denou the bidding of beings greater or less than man. This is not Michael Robartes at all: Michael Robartes is dead; dead for ten, for twenty years perhaps, I kept repeating to myself. I fell at last into a feverish sleep, waking up from time to time when we rushed past some little town, its slated roofs shining with wet, or still lake gleaming in the light. I had been too pre?occupied to ask where we were going, or to notice what tickets Michael Robartes had taken, but I knew now from the dire of the sun that we were goiward; and presently I knew also, by the way in which the trees had grown into the semblance of tattered beggars flying with bent heads towards the east, that we were approag the western coast. Then immediately I saw the sea between the low hills upon the left, its dull grey broken into white patches and lines.
When we left the train we had still, I found, some way to go, a out, buttoning our coats about us, for the wind was bitter and violent. Michael Robartes was silent, seeming anxious to leave me to my thoughts; and as we walked between the sea and the rocky side of a great promontory, I realized with a new perfe what a shock had been given to all my habits of thought and of feelings, if indeed some mysterious ge had not taken pla the substany mind, for the grey waves, plumed with scudding foam, had grown part of a teeming, fantastier life; and when Michael Robartes poio a square a?looking house, with a much smaller and newer building us lee, set out on the very end of a dilapidated and almost deserted pier, and said it was the Temple of the Alchemical Rose, I ossessed with the phantasy that the sea, which kept c it with showers of white foam, was claiming it as part of some indefinite and passionate life,