The issue of the Moscow Journal for March 26, 1887, announced the return of Prince Ivan Gregoriev to Russia after a thirty-month absence abroad; adding that he was in Moscow for a few days only, before proceeding to his country-place of Maidonovo, near Klin. As a matter of fact, Ivan, after a railway journey of sixty hours, arrived in Moscow on the evening of one day, and remained at the Slaviansky Bazaar until the afternoon of the next. During this brief period, he was besieged by visitors of every description, from the barest acquaintances, to men like Balakirev and Ostrovsky; and, to the general chagrin, all were alike refused. Ivan was in his blackest mood. When, three hours before the departure of the Klin train, Piotr, taking his life in his hands, did admit Kashkine, it was half an hour before that rarest of diplomatists could bring the gleam of one faint smile across his old friend's face. In his memoirs the admirable Constantine has left a picture of Gregoriev as he was at this period—in his forty-eighth year:

"A figure lean, not very tall, giving the dual impression of wiry fortitude, and a delicacy that was rather spiritual than physical, Gregoriev's body formed a marked contrast to his face—at sight of which, on the day of his return, I confess to having been shocked, so changed had it become since my last view of it. From black, with a slight silvering only at the temples, his hair and beard were now almost pure white. The lines of care in his face had deepened incredibly. The skin had something of that parchment look that I had supposed to be the special mark of the recluse; but Ivan told me he had been a good deal out-of-doors in the last months. Without asking, I perceived at once that he was under his special morbid scourge; and when I learned that he intended retiring to Klin for a period of complete isolation, I was less astonished than dismayed. I think I had even a momentary presentiment that from this retirement he was destined never to emerge; though I knew that he was still some years removed from his fiftieth birthday. However, with Ivan Mikhailovitch, time was never a thing to be considered. He was a man of eternity."

Into their two hours together on that last Moscow day, the friends crowded much important conversation. Ivan unfolded his plans for the future; and discussed those manuscripts he had brought back, and which he afterwards intrusted to Kashkine to be delivered to his publishers. Immediately upon the first printing, they were to be sent to the Musical Society, to be passed or rejected for the next season's concert series. This business finished, Ivan plunged into an impulsive account of the bizarre history of his last months in Florence. But when he had reached a half-way point, he as suddenly halted; and, Piotr a moment later announcing that the carriage waited to drive him to his train, Ivan bade his friend a hurried farewell. Kashkine only learned the end of the tale that interested him so deeply, some fourteen months later.

Once more, as on the first day of his possession, Ivan reached his hermitage in the late afternoon of a spring day. But this home-coming was not like the first; for, among the little throng of servants gathered in the hall to meet their Prince, one face was missing. After hasty greetings, Ivan, with a sudden sense of the truth, asked haltingly for the old servitor whom he had sent back to Russia, nine months before, from Naples. The reply, anticipated by but one moment, was a great shock to him. Old SÓsha had been buried yesterday; his last words being a greeting to the master he had so longed to see again.—And Ivan might have been present at the funeral of this dearly-loved old man!—But he made no rebuke; for he knew that the humility of these poor creatures would never have permitted them to disturb his pleasure for one of themselves.

It was, perhaps, only morbidness that Ivan should have allowed the death of SÓsha, a man of eighty-four, to affect him as it did. Yet the following weeks taught him that all his recent gloomy meditations and self-analyses had had in them an element of affectation incompatible with real grief. Was it not real grief, then, that he was suffering now? For weeks he lived in the blackness that was horrible to those who watched him. And finally Piotr, who dared anything for his master, sent, secretly, for Kashkine—whom he believed endowed with miraculous powers wherever his Prince was concerned. But for once Kashkine's presence seemed powerless to rouse the composer from his lassitude: a feat which was eventually accomplished by one who knew him more intimately than any man.

It was now many years since his cousin and true companion first began to make her deeply affectionate study of Ivan's moods. In May, according to a former custom, Nathalie came down to Maidonovo, unaccompanied by her daughters. And Kashkine, after watching her during one day and night, retreated, gallantly leaving the field to her. It was one of the few times on which she came alone to Ivan's home; and her excuse for the act was one newly characteristic of her:

"My dear Ivan, I am forty-four years old: a safe age, if ever woman is to attain to one. I now, therefore, insist upon the comfort of personal freedom. It is the one compensation permitted for the loss of the youth which can make freedom dangerous."

Ivan's reply to the theory was a smile. For neither by him nor by herself could the graceful, beautifully groomed, chic little woman possibly have been regarded as she chose to describe herself. At the same time, it would have been a person utterly beyond the pale who would have admitted the possibility of impropriety in the behavior of the Princess FÉodoreff, one of the greatest ladies of Petersburg. She had long since recovered any ground lost during the few months of her separation from her dissolute Prince. And within the last eighteen months rather a signal honor had been offered her in the intimate friendship of the Grand-Duchess Catharine:—most irreproachable, unapproachable, and, at the same time, most popular, of the imperial women of Russia. Perhaps her friendship with this Princess was the more genuine and the more truly sympathetic in that, as she was well aware, her own history and that of her Imperial Highness bore many points of resemblance. For the great-granddaughter of Constantine the Abdicator was the wife of one of the most dissolute of the Grand-Dukes, whose abuses of manhood no ingenuity of his proud wife was able to conceal. Hence Nathalie, herself so intimately acquainted with this poignant form of suffering, was just now very full of her friendship with the beautiful Princess; and she poured into Ivan's half-listening ears all that she knew of this exquisite woman, married at seventeen, left alone in her cold and unapproachable state, to learn all the dire details of a state marriage: and now mother of a son who, in very boyhood, was already believed to be gazing with interest down the path his father had trod. Even Nathalie herself could not guess the anguish with which this secret dread had already filled the mother's heart; nor the struggle she was prepared to make before her motherhood should be dishonored as her wifehood had always been.

In time the story of this Princess, told, day by day, in semi-accidental snatches, laid hold of Ivan's imagination. By degrees he began to enter into the life that was being laid bare before him with all the intimate understanding that is part of the Creator's gift. For many weeks after the departure of his cousin, indeed, Ivan mused upon the subject of the royal lady, dowered, apparently, with every enviable possession of wealth and power, and yet one of the most truly unfortunate of humankind. The immediate result of this was the writing of the "Three Studies," unnamed, so long left in manuscript, and so persistently misunderstood. It is only, indeed, within the last five years that they have been discovered to bear a direct relationship to the last three movements of his greatest symphony. To-day they form the treasure of that small but expanding cult who have been so mocked at for their serious study of the connection between various harmonies and the mental emotions, from which has grown the dream of establishing a perfect musical law.

It was the spring of 1889 before Ivan at last began to work seriously upon his "Sixth Symphony": that which had been growing in his mind for more than ten years; and which, while it forms, perhaps, his greatest claim to immortality, was the first to open the eyes of Philistia to the splendors of his powers. Like all of those few artistic masterpieces that approach perfection, the "Tosca Symphony" is popular alike with the many and with the few; because it contains something of the essence of all humanity: strikes a chord that must find some echo in the breast of every man and woman that has known the meaning of pain. But, superb as was the height attained in this work, Ivan paid dearly for its accomplishment. For, from the nervous breakdown that marked its conclusion, he never fully recovered.

In the weeks dividing New Year's Day from the April of 1890, Gregoriev seldom left his bed. He was attended night and day by Piotr and Piotr's son; who saw, with growing alarm, how slowly the strength seemed to come back to him, and how little increase of vitality arrived with that quickening of the year to which Ivan had always heretofore responded so eagerly.

Through the long days during which he alternated between fever and debility, Ivan sank into a hell of the senses; and daily gazed with longing upon the still closed gates of life. He had heard the low-calling voices of departed Shades. He had been given misty glimpses of the Elysian land that lay beyond those high black bars. Long and long was it before he could turn his face from that vision back to the grays and glooms of his worn routine. And when at last it became patent to him that this must be, he still clung to the erratic and feverish fancies for the abnormal, that had come to him in his illness. By May the Maidonovo household stood aghast at the incomprehensible manner of their silent master's renewed life. Those who knew him well surmised his mental condition; but even Kashkine could not fathom the depth to which his thoughts had sunk. Certainly none but a Russian could, or can, comprehend the terrible reality of what must, to the inhabitants of the sunshine lands, seem the mere wilful depression of a hypochondriac. But those men and women who have dwelt all their lives beneath a sky of leaden gray, in an horizonless space of desolate, unbroken steppe; whose children and children's children must come into a heritage even heavier than their own, handed down from those first, hunted creatures who began the age-long battle with ice and snow and frozen hurricanes—these, alas! know well that the disease of Ivan was no pretence, but a reality, as grim, as terrible, as sullen, as the temperament of their peasant-brethren. And not one of them but had felt, to some degree, the same, deep, passionless, revulsive anger that was working in him, and turning him from the old, secret habits of spiritual meditation and high thought, into passions of blasphemy and atheism which burned ever deeper into his brain.

It was in this final phase of inward revolt against the submissive religions that are permitted to govern the world, that Ivan, nearly recovered from bodily weakness, took up the history of religion and began to search, diligently, through all the forms of anthropomorphism, for that one which should display the most artistic beauty and formal grace. It was impossible to hesitate long. There is no paganism of obscure antiquity that can compare, in poetic beauty, with the scarce-forgotten rites of the Hellenic Pantheon. Fired by an unlooked-for enthusiasm in his chosen task of apostasy, he finally took for his protective deity that least divine, weakest, and most exquisite of the gods of the Greeks:—Aphrodite.

Mad Ivan! Far indeed went he in his bitter defiance of High God! His attendants looked on in frightened mystification at the changes now preparing in the inner of the two up-stairs rooms in which their master had been wont to work. Some simple carpentry; a large number of unusual articles commanded from Moscow: one, more expensive than all the others, brought in a coffin-like box from France; the transferrence of all his paraphernalia of work into the outer room; and behold the fane of Ivan's new goddess!—a semicircular chamber hung in deep violet; in the centre of the jut a low, circular pedestal, draped in black, and flanked on either side by two high church candlesticks of wrought silver, containing painted candles kept always alight, the windowless room containing, beside these, only one, silver lamp hanging from the centre of the sombre ceiling. Opposite the altar-pedestal, stood the single piece of furniture in this strange room: a long, low couch of Spanish leather, violet in color, placed so that the occupant could gaze directly upon the figure finally lifted to the pedestal prepared for her: an exquisite modern statue of Aphrodite of old, which had won a young Frenchman the Prix de Rome, and was compared by those authorities not inimical to the sculptor, to be worthy of the chisel of Praxiteles. Ivan had taken advantage of the quarrel among the committee who were considering it for purchase for the Luxembourg, and had bought it from its affronted creator for one hundred thousand francs.

Three workmen and Piotr had, during its preparation, gained glimpses of this room. Afterwards Piotr entered it once or twice in the month for the purpose of cleaning. But, barring this, once the door was shut on the completed shrine, no one save Ivan beheld it; though he soon knew it to be the chief reason why he was spoken of with bated breath by his own servants; and called by the inhabitants of Klin a madman. And, truly, there were days when his appearance and behavior might have brought that thought to other minds than those of illiterate peasants. But these were only the hours when he was dominated by the fantastic spirit inherent in the pungent paste which he kept in a golden, jewel-studded tube at the feet of the goddess. For, when the black butterfly of his melancholy now danced before his eyes, Ivan reverted remorselessly to that opium which he had for years abstained from. These days were irregular, however, and the act voluntary, being not as yet compelled by physical craving. And, in the intervals, he pursued his ordinary occupations of reading and composing, to which he had now added the transcribing of his own memoirs and a self-instituted office of beauty-worship at the statue-shrine, inaugurated in a fit of angry repudiation of Christian rites, and continued in that spirit of half-ironical defiance that was now his most salient characteristic. So, month by month, he dwelt alone, withdrawing daily more and more within himself, and by degrees lessening personal contact as much as possible even with his servants. Nevertheless he retained one means of communication with the world beyond, in a correspondence maintained with half a dozen representatives of as many different grades of life: Nathalie, of whom he constantly demanded further details of the story of the Grand-Duchess Catharine; Balakirev, now long since in Zaremba's chair at the Petersburg Conservatoire; AvÉlallement in Hamburg; an odd little Parisian journalist—through whom he had eventually obtained the ThÉbaud Venus; and, lastly, there departed from Maidonovo, twice a month, letters addressed to the inmate of a certain convent in the Arno Valley near Florence, whence replies as regularly arrived, giving quaintly monotonous accounts of the life and welfare of one Vittoria Lodi, at present merely a dependant in the convent and the special penitent of the writer: a little old priest, the only man ever allowed within those sacred walls.

In every one of these people Ivan, despite his distaste for personal contact with men, took the keenest interest. Their welfare was of genuine moment to him; though wherefore, he could not himself have said. Probably this form of communion with his fellow-beings satisfied the hunger for social intercourse without which man cannot exist as man. And by degrees his memoirs—the continuation of a sporadic journal long kept up, which was, however, merely a mass of disconnected thoughts, flashes of perception, remarks on personal events, and endless reflections on the unrevealed Alpha and Omega of life—began to be filled with other matter: chapter after chapter containing nothing but accounts of and speculations concerning two beings as far apart as the poles of the earth, and bearing no such similarity: the history and surmised character of Nathalie's beloved patroness, the Grand-Duchess Catharine, and those of the child of the wild romance of Alexandrine Nikitenko and Vittorio Lodi.

As to the mental atmosphere in which Ivan passed these strange days and nights of his, it was indescribable, but peculiarly powerful. For, just as there are certain incidents or periods in our lives which, for no perceptible reason, stand out in our memory with marked vividness, so these last weeks of Ivan's were so fraught with nervous electricity that each smallest incident took on the importance of an event. And Ivan, considering, became gradually convinced that these were the last days of his life.

Gregoriev was fifty years old; a man ordinarily normal, robust, unweakened by excesses of any description or by any irregularities of life. High-strung nervously though he was, there was still no doctor but would have given him many years yet to live. Nevertheless, his hallucination of approaching death remained unshaken; and he looked forward to the end quite calmly, as the sure conclusion of a prescribed term of study and work: the beginning of a rest of undetermined duration.

Unnatural as his life had become, the months from May to October were nevertheless fertile in production. All the works of this time, however, are so peculiar in style that they remained in manuscript long after his death, and the general public are still unfamiliar with that which is probably the greatest, though no doubt the strangest of them all: the "Pagan Fantasia," after the first reading of which Kashkine and Balakirev, who were alone together, looked angrily from each other to the fire, from which nothing but the memory of their friend's dead face saved that composition which afterwards came to exercise so powerful a fascination over both of them. At the same time, the spell which those unparalleled harmonies casts over the auditor is considered so unhealthy, that this flower of Ivan's madness is not yet in print. Others of the works of this time, the "Songs of the Herzeleide," the "House of Life," and the "Hymn to Pan" (both these last written for organ and orchestra), together with the "Serenade to Death," are gradually acquiring a public who listen in disorganized astonishment to these records of a soul in the strangest travail ever revealed to fellow-men.—But enough! Another paragraph, and Gregoriev is lost forever to Philistia!

Not only Kashkine, but all those who heard of Ivan at this time, believed that, behind his eccentricities, there still lurked a sardonic grin at his own behavior; than which there can surely be no healthier sign! Yet, towards the very end, he committed an act which once more plunged the most indulgent of his friends into exasperated anger with his folly.

Since his passing, the baton of Nicholas the well-beloved had been wielded by Brodsky, who had acquitted himself through two seasons of symphony concerts with considerable credit. The date of the first concert of the series of 1890-1891, had been set for October 9th; and its piÈce de rÉsistance was the "Sixth Symphony" of Gregoriev, whose fiftieth birthday was to be celebrated by the playing of this, his greatest work, with whose praises Moscow was already mysteriously a-murmur; and afterwards by a supper, to be given that evening by his old confrÈres of the Conservatoire. It was really Russia's capitulation to her greatest musician, in whose universal acclaim there was to be not one dissentient voice.

On the first day of the month Ivan received a letter from Kashkine, explaining these things, giving a minute plan of the arrangements, and eagerly congratulating Ivan on his assured triumph. For, well as he knew his friend's instability, Constantine never for an instant doubted that Ivan would consent to appear at a reunion for which, as Kashkine knew, he had been longing, bitterly, ever since the sudden accession to his father's wealth and title had barred him from the old-time fellowship.—Wherefore Constantine's letter was couched not in terms of pleading, but in sentences of joyous satisfaction at the prospect of Ivan's delight. This was the reply:

And Kashkine, crushing the letter savagely into a ball, muttered, between his teeth: "Ah! 'transformation'! we'll all drink to that! But, by God, it'll never come to him now!"

By a quarter before two o'clock on the afternoon of October 9, 1890, the Symphony Hall of the Moscow Conservatoire was filled to the doors. The winter season had doubly begun; for, outside, sleighs were flying joyously through the first snow-storm. All the inhabitants of the Kremlin and Equerries' quarters were back from estate and resort; and most of the ladies of their families were seated in the wreath of boxes that crowned the amphitheatre of the hall. Indeed, from a fashionable and musical point of view, it was an audience such as has seldom been surpassed in the old Russian city; and, to mondaine and musician alike, the Gregoriev symphony was the event of the afternoon. For was not its composer a Prince, a millionaire, and his composition the masterpiece of Russian musical literature?

In the left-hand stage-box were gathered a little group of his own, old circle, about the empty chair which had been reserved, in case—faintly possible—the erratic one should suddenly appear. Kashkine, Laroche, Ostrovsky, and Ivan's passionate young admirer Rimsky-Korsakow, sat there in silence, all of them thinking the same half-bitter, half-resentful thoughts. In their own minds they were persuaded that the success of the symphony meant more to them than to any other persons either in the audience or in the city. But they were oddly wrong. Near them were seated two women, one in a box, amid a little group of people of the extreme of fashion; the other by herself, in a stall in the parquet. Both of them were secretly and nervously afire. Both looked anxiously for Ivan's appearance, longing eagerly for a sight of his face. And the two of them were at opposite ends of the feminine world; for one was the Princess Nathalie FÉodoreff; the other, a white-faced, worn-looking, plainly dressed woman, seemingly of the lower middle-class, was Irina Petrovna; finished, now, with the active degradations of her life; living in a great silence, upon the scanty savings of her years of mad extravagance. For her, this was to have been a day of days: a daring expense, to be paid for by the sacrifice of luncheon and supper, little missed in the joys of anticipation and memory. Her worn-out emotions had fired again at the dream of meeting the one man who had for years remained the unshattered idol of her heart. Her comprehension of his music—life-music as it was—was fuller, perhaps, than that of the delicate Princess; to whom Ivan's unexpected absence was but a passing disappointment. She had come down from Petersburg to hear the symphony; and, since he was evidently not to be present, she suddenly decided to be the first to carry him the news of his triumph. As she considered the plan, her excitement grew; and she resolved to take the train which left at six o'clock for Klin: daring her cousin to turn her from his inhospitable door in the late evening.

Every one knows what happened at the concert, when, for the first time, the notes of that matchless symphony fell upon the ears of the world: when the supreme desolation of the magnificent, crashing retrogression of the finale held a thousand people in breathless, trembling stillness; the tears of Ivan's boundless yearning: the passions of the true Weldschmerz glazing every eye. Accounts of the mad storm of applause which finally rose into a chorus of shouts for Ivan, are still preserved in the scrap-books of those who were there. And, though Ivan came not and the noise was finally stilled, two hours later, when the audience trooped out into the snowy darkness, but one name was on every lip: one regret in every heart. Had he but known it, Ivan's act in not coming was an unconscious but complete revenge for his years of neglect.

At the entrance to the hall the Princess FÉodoreff parted from her astonished hostess, saying that she intended passing the night at the house of the Grand-Duchess—wife of the Governor-General. And, leaving her friends appeased by this sufficient but rather unexpected excuse, Nathalie hurried into a public droschky, and was presently flying through the streets towards the Petersburg station—and Ivan.

Thus was Ivan finally, and for all time, established in his own land. Thenceforward, while music shall endure, his name must be written among those who have advanced their most perfect of the arts to a higher standard. His work was done: his battle over. His name was blazoned for eternity on the roster of the Russian Great.

But the man? Where was he, what was he doing, upon this, his day?

It was half-past three when the first movement of the "Tosca Symphony" ended in the concert-hall. At that hour Ivan returned to his house from a long walk through the whitened fields, and, donning dressing-gown and slippers, went up to his work-room and shut the door. Moved by a most unusual impulse, he seated himself at the piano and began to play, from memory, some strains from the last act of "die GÖtterdÄmmerung." At the point where Brunhild, carried beyond herself and her abhorred mortality back to the heights of immortal perception and abnegation, sings, with divine calm, the words: "Ruhe, Ruhe, du Gott!"—Ivan paused. The phrase caught him up. The majesty of the chords in which the great German has framed it, suddenly fired him with longing: "Rest thee, Rest thee, thou God!" He played it over and over, meditatively, humming the words in the rich, low notes of the score. And in those moments his final hour was ushered in.

All day, struggle as he would, Ivan had been keyed to a pitch of nervous excitement by speculations concerning the concert in Moscow. Finally, at noon, he had gone out, determined upon attaining an animal fatigue which would rest his brain. His struggle with the wind and snow accomplished the first end, but not the second. Now, however, those words of the dying goddess—she who stood quietly awaiting her chosen death, brought a great calm to his mind. As he lingered over them his face changed, and a new look came into those eyes which had striven so many times, of late, to pierce the shadows that enshroud the future.

"Rest thee, oh God!"

Rest—for him! How often had he demanded it, in vain? Now, at last, he was enjoined to take it—for himself.

Rising from the piano he went to the door which led into the outer hall, locked it, and drew the bolt fast. Then, in the wall on the right, he pressed the spring which opened the invisible door to the room of the goddess. Entering there, he lighted the two candles at the flame of the burning lamp, and filled the little golden censer that swung before the statue, with incense; noting, the while, with his customary delight, the delicate transparency of the pure Carrara against the soft violet of the hangings behind her and the shadowy black at her feet. Finally, when the thin, fragrant smoke had begun to fill the room with its soft haze, he took the golden tube from its place on the pedestal, and prepared for himself the largest dose of the narcotic that he had ever dreamed of taking. After that he returned, quietly, to his piano.

Darkness had nearly come, and the unlighted music-room was lapped in a pleasant twilight, broken only by the faint gleam from the candles, which entered through the open doorway. The odor of the incense was everywhere; and the mystic scent and warmth of the inner air contrasted well with the shrieking of the demon-ridden wind outside the house. The atmosphere perfectly suited Ivan's state of mind. All anxiety about the concert had gone. Some inkling of success floated through his brain; but the matter now seemed infinitesimally small. The world, with its struggling millions of unknown men and women, was farther away from him now than the shadowland of the departed. For he was almost face to face with the problem of Eternity.

Alas! In the life he knew, how small a part did justice, that law innate in every human heart, play? How much less seemed the justice of God towards his creatures, good and bad, than the justice, or the pity, of these creatures for one another? It was this feeling which had generated that deep, all-pervading sense of injury, that anger with and distrust of the Almighty, that had thrown Ivan into his revolt. And who was to explain why we are left in the world without any knowledge of whence and whither; knowing only that from birth till death we are surrounded by evil:—evil rewarded; good defiled, disgraced; yet mankind still under the command of man and of God to walk straightly, in fear of promised damnation? It was the question he had asked in his "Tosca Symphony": that symphony of helpless, human wonder and sorrow. And the question, repeated for the last time in the great motif of the finale, was still unanswered.

He sat, now, drearily playing fragments of various works, his brain teeming with memories: of his mother, in her sweetness and purity, bound for life to the brute force that had crushed her youth away in the first days of her married life; of Nathalie and her husband, the husband who had been the—admirer—of her own mother; of that shadowy Princess whose grave eyes he beheld overflowing with her secret woe, as they overlooked the vast and misty throng of mismated womanhood; lastly of the daughter of a woman who had rebelled against her lot; the nameless child of Alexandrine Nikitenko, who, filled as she was with the vivid life of her passionate heritage, was about to be shrouded away from the world she loved in the coif and robe of the cloistered nun. Gentle women: pure men; God's world! Why are the two first so unfitted for the last? To God we apply the attributes of omnipotence, omniscience, omnipresence. If these attributes be true, whence the evil that rules the world?—Is our God a demon? It is the logical inference.

To-day, for the hundredth time, Ivan cast away his defences of sarcasm, mockery, sophistry, and faced that question that has gone unanswered from generation to generation. As he meditated, his face lost its recently acquired harshness; his deep eyes grew sadder even than their wont; the look of a vast, ineffaceable weariness settled upon him. With face uplifted he continued to play, drifting through his own many forms of that unanswered question into final silence. Then, rising, he passed, a little unsteadily, into the inner room, and ate once more of the thick black paste in its golden tube.

Twilight had now long since merged into darkness. In the work-room Ivan lighted two lamps, and then, going to the fireplace, which he had here substituted for the traditional stove, and wherein a low fire burned, he threw on half a dozen blocks of peat. Then, turning to the high bookcase near at hand, he drew down, with fumbling hands, the sixteen red-leather books that constituted his journal and newly-written memoirs. Standing there, he read certain passages of this transcription of his mental life. Finally, with a straightening of his figure, he took the books one by one, tore off the covers, and stuffed the closely written sheets into the flames. Afterwards, like one in a daze, he returned to the piano.

It was his own, strange "Invocation to Death" to which his half-numbed fingers turned. The sound of the notes reached his ears as if from a great distance. Also, he was conscious of a feeling of nausea which told him that the fatal narcotic was working, powerfully. After a time, his fingers fell from the keys. Out of the enclosing mists he heard a voice calling: the clear, sweet voice of one distant, but coming nearer. It was the voice of Sophia, his mother.

His face was uplifted, and he smiled as he echoed her words:

"Rest thee, Rest thee, thou God!"

With some difficulty he rose to his feet, and stumbled, heavily, into the inner room, where Aphrodite gleamed through her incense cloud. Here, with the air of one tired unto death, he sank down upon the leathern couch. And so the heavy eyelids closed over his weary, weary eyes.