of fear and
heaviness.

Lucian again shivered with a thrill of dread; he was afraid that he had
overworked himself and that he was suffering from the first symptoms of
grave illness. His mind dwelt on confused and terrible recollections, and
with a mad ingenuity gave form and substance to phantoms; and even now he
drew a long breath, almost imagining that the air in his room was heavy
and noisome, that it entered his nostrils with some taint of the crypt.
And his body was still languid, and though he made a half motion to rise
he could not find enough energy for the effort, and he sank again into
the chair. At all events, he would think no more of that sad house in the
field; he would return to those long struggles with letters, to the happy
nights when he had gained victories.

He remembered something of his escape from the desolation and the worse
than desolation that had obsessed him during that first winter in London.
He had gone free one bleak morning in February, and after those dreary
terrible weeks the desk and the heap and litter of papers had once more
engulfed and absorbed him. And in the succeeding summer, of a night when
he lay awake and listened to the birds, shining images came wantonly to
him. For an hour, while the dawn brightened, he had felt the presence of
an age, the resurrection of the life that the green fields had hidden,
and his heart stirred for joy when he knew that the held and possessed
all the loveliness that had so long moldered. He could scarcely fall
asleep for eager and leaping thoughts, and as soon as his breakfast
was over he went out and bought paper and pens of a certain celestial
stationer in Notting Hill. The street was not changed as he passed to and
fro on his errand. The rattling wagons jostled by at intervals, a rare
hansom came spinning down from London, there sounded the same hum and
jangle of the gliding trams. The languid life of the pavement was
unaltered; a few people, un-classed, without salience or possible
description, lounged and walked from east to west, and from west to east,
or slowly dropped into the byways to wander in the black waste to the
north, or perhaps go astray in the systems that stretched towards the
river. He glanced down these by-roads as he passed, and was astonished,
as always, at their mysterious and desert aspect. Some were utterly
empty; lines of neat, appalling residences, trim and garnished as if for
occupation, edging the white glaring road;