The seniors had a little discussion among themselves, in which the opinion of Mr. Norton appeared to be overborne by the majority of votes, and then the senior dean said shortly,— "Mr. Kennedy, we have come to the decision that it is undesirable for you to remain at St. Werner's at present, until you have mended your ways, and taken a different view of the duties and responsibilities of college life. You are rusticated for a year. You must leave to-morrow." Kennedy bowed and left the room. He, too, had been coming to a decision, and one that rendered all minor ones a matter of no consequence to him. During all the wet, and feverish, and sleepless night he had been determining what to do, and the event of this morning confirmed him still further. He was rusticated for a year; where could he go? Not to his father and his home, where every eye would look on him as a disgraced and characterless man; not to any of his relations or friends, who would regard him perhaps as a shame and burden; no, there was but one home for him, and that was the long home, undisturbed beneath the covering of the grave. The burden and mystery of life lay heavily on him -its lasting calamities and vanishing joys, its trials and disappointments. He would try whether, in a new state of life, the same distorted individuality was a necessary possession. Would it be necessary there also to live two lives in one, to have a soul, within whose precincts curse wrested with blessing, good with evil, and life with death? As life went with him then, he would rather escape from it even into annihilation; he groaned ETERNAL INDIVIDUALITY. 355 under it, and in spite of all he had heard or read, he had no fear whatever of the after-death. If he had any feeling about that, it was a feeling of curiosity alone. He could not wholly condemn himself: he felt that however much evil might have mastered him, good was the truest and most distinctive element of his being. He loved it even when he abandoned it, and yielded himself to sin. He could not believe that for these frailities he would be driven into an existence of unmitigated pain. He had no fear, no shadow of fear of the state of death, for he forgot that he would carry himself, his unchanged being—conscience, habit, and memory—into the other world. What he dreaded was the spasm of dying the convulsion that was to snap the thousand silver strings in the harp of life. This he shuddered at, but he consoled himself that it would be over in a moment. He took no food that day, but wrote to his father, to Eva, to Julian, Violet, and De Vayne. He told them his purpose, and prayed their forgiveness for all the wrongs he had done them. And then there seemed no more to do. With weak unsteady steps he paced his room, and looked at the old Swiss chamois-gun above the door. He took it down and handled it. It was a coarse clumsy weapon, and he could not trust it to effect his purpose. Shunning observation, he walked by back streets and passages until he came to a gunsmith's shop, where he bought a large pistol, under pretense of wanting it for the purposes of travel. He carried it home himself, but, instead of returning straight to his rooms, he was tempted to stroll for 356 STANDING IN THE WAY. a last time about the grounds. The delightful softness of the darkening air on that spring evening, and the cheerful gleam of lamps leaping up here and there between the trees, and flickering on the quiet river, enticed him up the glorious old intwined avenue into the shadow of the great oaks beyond, until he found himself leaning between the weeping willows over the bridge of Merham Hall, looking on the still gray poetic towers, and the three motionless reposing swans, and the gloaming of the west. And so, still thinking, thinking, thinking, he slowly wandered home. As he had determined to commit suicide that night, it mattered little to him at what hour it was done; and, opening the first book on the table, he tried to kill time until it grew later and darker. The book happened to be a Bible, and, conscious how much it jarred with his present frame of mind and his guilty purpose, he threw it down again; but not until his eye had caught the words: "AND HE SAW THE ANGEL OF THE LORD STANDING IN THE WAY." The verse haunted him against his will, till he half shuddered at the dim light which the moon made, as it struggled through the curtains only partially drawn, into the quaint old room. He would delay no longer, and loaded the pistol with a dreadful charge, which should not fail of carrying death. Some fancy seized him to put out the lights, and then, with a violent throbbing at the heart, and a wild prayer for God's mercy at that terrible hour, he took the pistol in his hand. At that very instant,-when there was hardly the motion of a hair's breadth between him and his fate, what was it that startled his attention, and caused his hand to drop, and fixed him there with open mouth and wild gaze, and caused him to shiver like the leaves of the acacia in a summer wind? Right before him-half hidden by the window curtains, and half drawing them back-clear and distinct, he saw the spirit of his dead mother with uplifted finger and sad reproachful eyes fixed upon her son. The countenance so sorrowfully beautiful, the long bright gleaming of the white robe, the tresses floating down over the shoulders like a golden vail, for one instant he saw them, not dim and shadowy, like the fading outlines of a dream, but with all the marked full character of living vision. "Oh, mother, mother!" he whispered, as he stretched out his hands, and sank trembling upon his knees, and bowed his head; but, as he raised his head again, there was nothing there; only the glimmer of lamps about the court, and the pale moonlight streaming through the curtains into the room. Unable to trust himself with the murderous weapon in his hand even for a moment, yet swept from his evil purpose by the violent reflux of new and better thoughts, he fired the pistol into the air. The barrel, enormously overloaded, burst in the discharge, and, uttering a cry, he fell fainting, with his right hand shattered, to the ground. His cry and the loud report of the explosion raised the alarm, and as the men rushed up and forced open the door of his room, they found him weltering in his blood upon the floor. CHAPTER XXIX. EVA ENTERS THE CHAPEL. "I took it for a fairy vision Of some bright creatures of the element, That in the colors of the rainbow live And play i' the plighted clouds; I was awe-struck, THE long, long illness that followed, and the weary time which it took to heal the mutilated hand, proved the greatest blessings that could have befallen the weak and erring heart of Edward Kennedy. They spared him the necessity of that heart-rending meeting with those whom he best loved, the dread of which had the most powerful incitement to urge upon him the thought of suicide. They gave him time to look before and after-they relieved the painful tension of his overwrought mind-they calmed him with the necessity for quiet thought and deep rest, after the anguish and turmoil of the bygone months. When he awoke to consciousness, Eva was sitting by his bedside in the sick-room. Slowly the wellremembered objects and the beloved face broke upon his recollection, but at first he could remember nothing more, nor connect the strange present with the excited past. Still more slowly-as when one breaks the azure sleep of some unruffled mountain mere by the skimming of a stone, and for a long time the clear |