dy had come when
Helen de Vallorbes departed so blithely to her bedchamber. And it was
here he remained, though nearly two hours had elapsed since then,
finding sleep impossible.

For the wakefulness and unrest of rapidly breeding illness were upon
him. His senses and his will had been in very active conflict. Desire
had licked him, as with fiery tongues, driving him onward. Honour,
self-contempt in face of temptation to sensual indulgence, an
aspiration after somewhat stoic asceticism which had come to influence
his action of late, held him back. But now, here and alone, the
immediately provoking cause of passion removed, reaction against the
strain of all that had very sensibly set in. He felt strangely astray,
as though drifting at hazard upon the waters of an unquiet,
mist-blinded sea. He was conscious of a deep-seated preoccupation
regarding some matter, which he was alike unable to forget or to
define. Formless images perplexed his vision. Formless thoughts pursued
one another, as with the hurry of rumoured calamity, through his mind.
A desolating apprehension of things insufficiently developed, of the
inconclusive, the immature, the unattained, of things mutilated, things
unfinished, born out of due time and incomplete, oppressed his fancy.
Even the events of the last few hours, in which he had played so
considerable a part, took on a shadowy semblance, ceased to appeal to
him as realities, began to merge themselves in that all-pervading
apprehension of defectiveness, of that which is wanting, lopped off, so
to speak, and docked. It was to him as though all natural, common-sense
relations were in abeyance, as though his own, usually precise, mental
processes were divorced from reason and experience, had got out of
perspective, in short--even as this low, wide, cedar-scented library,
of which the vaulted ceiling seemed to approach unduly close to the
mosaic, marble floor, and all its dwarfed furnishings, its squat tables
and almost legless chairs, had got out of perspective.

The alternate purposeless energy and weariful weakness of fever, just
as the alternate dry flush and trembling chill of it, distressed him.
He had slipped on a smoking-coat, but even the weight of this thin,
silk garment seemed oppressive, although, now and again, he felt as
though around his middle he wore a belt of ice. Not without
considerable exertion he rolled forward a couch--wide, high-backed,
legless, mounted upon little wheels--to