myself from falling. As I did so, she snatched her arm from my grasp,
as easily as if I had been a child; and, with a cry for help, fled
towards the further end of the street.

Still, the strange instinct of never losing hold of her, influenced
me. I followed, staggering like a drunken man. In a moment, she was
out of my reach; in another, out of my sight. I went on, nevertheless;
on, and on, and on, I knew not whither. I lost all ideas of time and
distance. Sometimes I went round and round the same streets, over and
over again. Sometimes I hurried in one direction, straight forward.
Wherever I went, it seemed to me that she was still just before; that
her track and my track were one; that I had just lost my hold of her,
and that she was just starting on her flight.

I remember passing two men in this way, in some great thoroughfare.
They both stopped, turned, and walked a few steps after me. One
laughed at me, as a drunkard. The other, in serious tones, told him to
be silent; for I was not drunk, but mad--he had seen my face as I
passed under a gas-lamp, and he knew that I was mad.

"MAD!"--that word, as I heard it, rang after me like a voice of
judgment. "MAD!"--a fear had come over me, which, in all its frightful
complication, was expressed by that one word--a fear which, to the man
who suffers it, is worse even than the fear of death; which no human
language ever has conveyed, or ever will convey, in all its horrible
reality, to others. I had pressed onward, hitherto, because I saw a
vision that led me after it--a beckoning shadow, ahead, darker even
than the night darkness. I still pressed on, now; but only because I
was afraid to stop.