For a day or two, I lay on the sofa, or on the floor,--anywhere,
according as I happened to sink down,--with a heavy head and aching
limbs, and no purpose, and no power. Then there came, one night which
appeared of great duration, and which teemed with anxiety and horror;
and when in the morning I tried to sit up in my bed and think of it, I
found I could not do so.

Whether I really had been down in Garden Court in the dead of the night,
groping about for the boat that I supposed to be there; whether I had
two or three times come to myself on the staircase with great terror,
not knowing how I had got out of bed; whether I had found myself
lighting the lamp, possessed by the idea that he was coming up
the stairs, and that the lights were blown out; whether I had been
inexpressibly harassed by the distracted talking, laughing, and groaning
of some one, and had half suspected those sounds to be of my own making;
whether there had been a closed iron furnace in a dark corner of
the room, and a voice had called out, over and over again, that Miss
Havisham was consuming within it,--these were things that I tried to
settle with myself and get into some order, as I lay that morning on
my bed. But the vapor of a limekiln would come between me and them,
disordering them all, and it was through the vapor at last that I saw
two men looking at me.

"What do you want?" I asked, starting; "I don't know you."

"Well, sir," returned one of them, bending down and touching me on the
shoulder, "this is a matter that you'll soon arrange, I dare say, but
you're arrested."

"What is the debt?"

"Hundred and twenty-three pound, fifteen, six. Jeweller's account, I
think."

"What is to be done?"

"You had better come to my house," said the man. "I keep a very nice
house."

I made some attempt to get up and dress myself. When I next attended
to them, they were standing a little off from the bed, looking at me. I
still lay there.

"You see my state," said I. "I would come with you if I could; but
indeed I am quite unable. If you take me from here, I think I shall die
by the way."

Perhaps they replied, or argued the point, or tried to encourage me to
believe that I was better than I thought. Forasmuch as they hang in
my memory by only this one slender thread, I don't know what they did,
except that they forbore to remove me.

That I had a fever and was avoided, that I suffered greatly, that
I often lost my reason, that the time