Page:Following darkness (IA followingdarknes00reid).pdf/321

 happened. It meant that everything was finished, that I should never see Katherine again. I was filled with desolation, with a kind of sick feeling that my love had been superfluous, wasted, and perhaps distasteful. Last year I had been sorry to say good-bye to her; I had dreaded the new life opening out before me; but I had had the prospect of meeting her again at a year's end, and the belief that she cared for me and would remember me. Now there was nothing—nothing.

My grief was mingled with a kind of bitter, impotent rage against I knew not what. I kicked a stick that lay in my path savagely out of the way, cursing it under my breath. I flung myself down among the bracken. Sometimes a kind of blank would come into my mind, and I would find myself staring stupidly at the trees, while for a few moments an altogether different thought would slip into my brain; then my grief would overwhelm me once more, and blot out the world.

But was this grief I felt? I do not know. It was different from what I felt later. It was something violent and maddening, sweeping over me in paroxysms, leaving me intervals of cold insensibility. And late that night, when, thoroughly wearied out, I went to bed, and from sheer exhaustion would be dropping off to sleep, from time to time it would pierce through my numbing senses, and waken me sharply, as if some one had violently pulled me, so that I would start up, yet for a moment not realize what it was that had wakened me.

I did not go back to Derryaghy on the next day or the next. I took long walks, and it was during these solitary rambles that the thought of death came irresistibly to me. I felt that my life was become an intolerable burden, and in my inexperience I imagined that the pain I felt now I should feel always. I thought of shooting myself, of taking poison, only I disliked the idea of other people knowing. Was there not a better way? I thought of swimming out so