oid darkness of old; it is filled with
changing visions of brilliant colours and ever-varying forms, rising,
falling, whirling hither and thither with every second. Even when
the handkerchief is passed over them, the once sightless eyes, though
bandaged fast, are yet not blinded as they were before.

It was so with my mental vision. After the utter oblivion and darkness
of a deep swoon, consciousness flashed like light on my mind, when I
found myself in my father's presence, and in my own home. But, almost
at the very moment when I first awakened to the bewildering influence
of that sight, a new darkness fell upon my faculties--a darkness, this
time, which was not utter oblivion; a peopled darkness, like that which
the bandage casts over the opened eyes of the blind.

I had sensations, I had thoughts, I had visions, now--but they all acted
in the frightful self-concentration of delirium. The lapse of time, the
march of events, the alternation of day and night, the persons who moved
about me, the words they spoke, the offices of kindness they did for
me--all these were annihilated from the period when I closed my eyes
again, after having opened them for an instant on my father, in my own
study.

My first sensation (how soon it came after I had been brought home, I
know not) was of a terrible heat; a steady, blazing heat, which seemed
to have shrivelled and burnt up the whole of the little world around me,
and to have left me alone to suffer, but never to consume in it. After
this, came a quick, restless, unintermittent toiling of obscure thought,
ever in the same darkened sphere, ever on the same impenetrable subject,
ever failing to reach some distant and visionary result. It was as if
something were imprisoned in my mind, and moving always to and fro in
it--moving, but never getting free.

Soon, these thoughts began to take a form that I could recognise.

In the clinging heat and fierce seething fever, to which neither waking
nor sleeping brought a breath of freshness or a dream of change, I
began to act my part over again, in the events that had passed, but in
a strangely altered character. Now, instead of placing implicit trust in
others, as I had done; instead of failing to discover a significance and
a warning in each circumstance as it arose, I was suspicious from the
first--suspicious of Margaret, of her father, of her mother, of Mannion,
of the very servants in the house. In the hideous phantasmagoria of
my