ere's a change
we'll wake you.'

Elsmere bent down and kissed the squire's forehead tenderly, as a son
might have done. By this time he himself could hardly stand. He crept
away to his own room, his nerves still quivering with the terror of that
sudden waking, the horror of that struggle.

It was impossible to sleep. The moon was at the full outside. He drew
back the curtains, made up the fire, and, wrapping himself in a fur coat
which Flaxman had lately forced upon him, sat where he could see the
moonlit park, and still be within the range of the blaze.

As the excitement passed away a reaction of feverish weakness set in.
The strangest whirlwind of thoughts fled through him in the darkness,
suggested very often by the figures on the seventeenth-century tapestry
which lined the walls. Were those the trees in the wood-path? Surely
that was Catherine's figure, trailing--and that dome--strange! Was he
still walking in Grey's funeral procession, the Oxford buildings looking
sadly down? Death here! Death there! Death everywhere, yawning under
life from the beginning! The veil which hides the common abyss, in sight
of which men could not always hold themselves and live, is rent asunder,
and he looks shuddering into it.

Then the image changed, and in its stead, that old familiar image of the
river of Death took possession of him. He stood himself on the brink; on
the other side were Grey and the squire. But he felt no pang of
separation, of pain; for he himself was just about to cross and join
them! And during a strange brief lull of feeling the mind harboured
image and expectation alike with perfect calm.

Then the fever-spell broke--the brain cleared--and he was terribly
himself again. Whence came it--this fresh inexorable consciousness? He
tried to repel it, to forget himself, to cling blindly, without thought,
to God's love and Catherine's. But the anguish mounted fast. On the one
hand, this fast-growing certainty, urging and penetrating through every
nerve and fibre of the shaken frame; on the other, the ideal fabric of
his efforts and his dreams, the New Jerusalem of a regenerate faith; the
poor, the loving, and the simple walking therein!

'_My God! my God! no time, no future!_'

In his misery he moved to the uncovered window, and stood looking
through it, seeing and not seeing. Outside, the river, just filmed with
ice, shone under the moon; over it bent the trees, laden with
hoar-frost. Was that a heron, risi