othing of what was going on about me, and not sleeping--for I
was conscious of my own repose. In this state my fevered mind broke
loose from me, while my weary body was at rest, and in a trance, or
day-dream of my fancy--I know not what to call it--I saw Walter
Hartright. I had not thought of him since I rose that morning--Laura
had not said one word to me either directly or indirectly referring to
him--and yet I saw him now as plainly as if the past time had returned,
and we were both together again at Limmeridge House.

He appeared to me as one among many other men, none of whose faces I
could plainly discern. They were all lying on the steps of an immense
ruined temple. Colossal tropical trees--with rank creepers twining
endlessly about their trunks, and hideous stone idols glimmering and
grinning at intervals behind leaves and stalks and branches--surrounded
the temple and shut out the sky, and threw a dismal shadow over the
forlorn band of men on the steps. White exhalations twisted and curled
up stealthily from the ground, approached the men in wreaths like
smoke, touched them, and stretched them out dead, one by one, in the
places where they lay. An agony of pity and fear for Walter loosened
my tongue, and I implored him to escape. "Come back, come back!" I
said. "Remember your promise to HER and to ME. Come back to us before
the Pestilence reaches you and lays you dead like the rest!"

He looked at me with an unearthly quiet in his face. "Wait," he said,
"I shall come back. The night when I met the lost Woman on the highway
was the night which set my life apart to be the instrument of a Design
that is yet unseen. Here, lost in the wilderness, or there, welcomed
back in the land of my birth, I am still walking on the dark road which
leads me, and you, and the sister of your love and mine, to the unknown
Retribution and the inevitable End. Wait and look. The Pestilence
which touches the rest will pass ME."

I saw him again. He was still in the forest, and the numbers of his
lost companions had dwindled to very few. The temple was gone, and the
idols were gone--and in their place the figures of dark, dwarfish men
lurked murderously among the trees, with bows in their hands, and
arrows fitted to the string. Once more I feared for Walter, and cried
out to warn him. Once more he turned to me, with the immovable quiet
in his face.

"Another step," he said, "on the dark road. Wait and look. The ar