so died.

CHAPTER 59

The Plots begin to fail, and Doubts and Dangers to disturb the Plotter

Ralph sat alone, in the solitary room where he was accustomed to take
his meals, and to sit of nights when no profitable occupation called
him abroad. Before him was an untasted breakfast, and near to where his
fingers beat restlessly upon the table, lay his watch. It was long past
the time at which, for many years, he had put it in his pocket and gone
with measured steps downstairs to the business of the day, but he took
as little heed of its monotonous warning, as of the meat and drink
before him, and remained with his head resting on one hand, and his eyes
fixed moodily on the ground.

This departure from his regular and constant habit, in one so regular
and unvarying in all that appertained to the daily pursuit of riches,
would almost of itself have told that the usurer was not well. That he
laboured under some mental or bodily indisposition, and that it was one
of no slight kind so to affect a man like him, was sufficiently shown by
his haggard face, jaded air, and hollow languid eyes: which he raised
at last with a start and a hasty glance around him, as one who suddenly
awakes from sleep, and cannot immediately recognise the place in which
he finds himself.

'What is this,' he said, 'that hangs over me, and I cannot shake off? I
have never pampered myself, and should not be ill. I have never moped,
and pined, and yielded to fancies; but what CAN a man do without rest?'

He pressed his hand upon his forehead.

'Night after night comes and goes, and I have no rest. If I sleep, what
rest is that which is disturbed by constant dreams of the same detested
faces crowding round me--of the same detested people, in every variety
of action, mingling with all I say and do, and always to my defeat?
Waking, what rest have I, constantly haunted by this heavy shadow of--I
know not what--which is its worst character? I must have rest. One
night's unbroken rest, and I should be a man again.'

Pushing the table from him while he spoke, as though he loathed the
sight of food, he encountered the watch: the hands of which were almost
upon noon.

'This is strange!' he said; 'noon, and Noggs not here! What drunken
brawl keeps him away? I would give something now--something in money
even after that dreadful loss--if he had stabbed a man in a tavern
scuffle, or broken into a house, or picked a pocket, or done anything
that would