le scenes, till he had looked and looked through a
hundred thoughts which no man has a right to entertain for a moment.
True; he had entertained them with horror; but he ought not to have
entertained them at all; he ought to have kicked them contemptuously out
and back to the devil, from whence they came. It may be again, that this
is impossible to man; that prayer is the only refuge against that
Walpurgis-dance of the witches and the fiends, which will, at hapless
moments, whirl unbidden through a mortal brain: but Elsley did not pray.

So, leaving these fancies in his head too long, he soon became
accustomed to them; and accustomed too, to the Nemesis which they bring
with them; of chronic moodiness and concealed rage. Day by day he was
lashing himself up into fresh fury, and yet day by day he was becoming
more careful to conceal that fury. He had many reasons: moral cowardice,
which made him shrink from the tremendous consequences of an explosion--
equally tremendous, were he right or wrong. Then the secret hope,
perhaps the secret consciousness, that he was wrong, and was only saying
to God, like the self-deceiving prophet, "I do well to be angry;" then
the honest fear of going too far; of being surprised at last into some
hideous and irreparable speech or deed, which he might find out too late
was utterly unjust: then at moments (for even that would cross him) the
devilish notion, that, by concealment, he might lure Lucia on to give
him a safe ground for attack. All these, and more, tormented him for a
wretched fortnight, during which he became, at such an expense of
self-control as he had not exercised for years, courteous to Campbell,
more than courteous to Lucia; hiding under a smiling face, wrath which
increased with the pressure brought to bear upon it.

Campbell and Lucia, Mellot, Valencia, and Frank, utterly deceived, went
on more merrily than ever, little dreaming that they walked and talked
daily with a man who was fast becoming glad to flee to the pit of hell,
but for the fear that "God would be there also." They, meanwhile,
chatted on, enjoying, as human souls are allowed to do at rare and
precious moments, the mere sensation of being; of which they would talk
at times in a way which led them down into deep matters: for instance,--

"How pleasant to sit here for ever!" said Claude, one afternoon, in the
inn garden at Beddgelert, "and say, not with Descartes, 'I think,
therefore I exist;' but simply, 'I