He wandered alone. He drank wine alone to stupefy himself; and paralyze a moment the dark foes to man that preyed upon his soul. He wandered alone amidst the temples of old Rome, and lay stony-eyed, woe-begone, among their ruins, worse wrecked than they.
Last of all came the climax, to which solitude, that gloomy yet fascinating foe of minds diseased, pushes the hopeless.
He wandered alone at night by dark streams, and eyed them, and eyed them, with decreasing repugnance. There glided peace; perhaps annihilation.
What else was left him?
These dark spells have been broken by kind words, by loving and cheerful voices.
The humblest friend the afflicted one possesses may speak, or look, or smile, a sunbeam between him and that worst madness Gerard now brooded.
Where was Teresa? Where his hearty, kind, old landlady?
They would see with their homely but swift intelligence; they would see and save.
No: they knew not where he was, or whither he was gliding.
And is there no mortal eye upon the poor wretch, and the dark road he is going?