Charles rode his horse slowly homeward. The moon got up before he reached the wild expanse of Cressley Common, a wide sea of undulating heath, with here and there a grey stone peeping above its surface in the moon-light like a distant sail.

Charles was feverish—worn out in body and mind—literally. Some men more than others are framed to endure misery, and live on, and on, and on in despair. Is this melancholy strength better, or the weakness that faints under the first strain of the rack? Happy that at the longest it cannot be for very long—happy that “man that is born of a woman hath but a short time to live,” seeing that he is “full of misery.”

Charles was conscious only of extreme fatigue; that for days he had eaten little and rested little, and that his short snatches of sleep, harassed by the repetition of his waking calculations and horrors, tired rather than refreshed him.

When fever is brewing, just as electric lights glimmer from the sullen mask of cloud on the eve of a storm, there come sometimes odd flickerings that seem to mock and warn.

Every overworked man, who has been overtaken by fever in the midst of his toil and complications, knows well the kind of tricks his brain has played him on the verge of that chaos.

Charles put his hand to his breast, and felt in his pocket for a letter, the appearance of which was sharp and clear on his retina as if he had seen it but a moment before.

“What have I done with it?” he asked himself—“the letter Hincks gave me?”

He searched his pockets for it, a letter of which this picture was so bright—purely imaginary! He was going to turn about and search the track he had traversed for it; but he bethought him, “To whom was the letter written?” No answer could he find. “To whom?” To no one—nothing—an imagination. Conscious of a sudden, he was scared.

“I want a good rest—I want some sleep—waking dreams. This is the way fellows go mad. What the devil can have put it into my head?”

Now rose before him the tall trees that gather as you approach the vale of Carwell, and soon the steep gables and chimneys of the Grange glimmered white among their boughs.

There in his mind, as unaccountably, was the fancy that he had met and spoken with his father, old Squire Harry, at the Catstone, as he crossed the moor.

“I’ll give his message—yes, I’ll give your message.”

And he thought what possessed him to come out without his hat, and he looked whiter than ever.

And then he thought, “What brought him there?”

And then, “What was his message?”

Again a shock, a chasm—his brain had mocked him.

Dreadful when that potent servant begins to mutiny, and instead of honest work for its master finds pastime for itself in fearful sport.

“My God! what am I thinking of?” he said, with a kind of chill, looking back over his shoulder.

His tired horse was plucking a mouthful of grass that grew at the foot of a tree.

“We are both used up,” he said, letting his horse, at a quicker pace, pursue its homeward path. “Poor fellow, you are tired as well as I. I’ll be all right, I............