Broken health; means wasted; innocence fled; Margaret parted from him by another gulf wider than the grave! The hot fit of despair passed away.
The cold fit of despair came on.
Then this miserable young man spurned his gay companions, and all the world.
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, woebegone, 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?