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Rh, the Generations of the Dead, were gone for evermore. As he stood there in the midnight solitude, it seemed to him as if, in the midst of his virile and adventurous life, he suddenly paused for the first time, and thought itself paused with him; it was because he was, for the first time, a dreamer—for the first time a lover.

Something of melancholy, of foreboding, were on him; the world for once seemed weary to him; he wondered why men lived only to suffer and to die. In all his years before he had never felt this; they had been filled with rapid action and vigorous strength, finding their joys in the close conflict of peril, in the mere sense of abundant and powerful life, in the victories of an athlete wrestling breast to breast with the lion or bear, and in the swift sweep of a wild gallop through jungles of the tropics, or cold crisp dawns of northern moorlands. Now he knew that his life was no longer under his own governance; now he knew that the vague fantasy of a baseless dream was dearer to him than anything which the earth held. It had its sweetness and its bitterness both: she lived; she had remembered him; she was not happy; this was all he knew, but it was enough to fill the night with her