Frank took them.  It was impossible to continue the conversation.  Frank made a remark, and the young men bade each other good-night.

As Mike went up the staircase to his room, his exultation swelled, and in one of those hallucinations of the brain consequent upon nerve excitement, and in which we are conscious of our insanity, he wondered the trivial fabric of the cottage did not fall, and his soul seemed to pierce the depth and mystery imprisoned in the stars.  He undressed slowly, looking at himself in the glass, pausing when he drew off his waistcoat, unbuttoning his braces with deliberation.

“I can make nothing of it; there never was any one like me....  I could do anything, I might have been Napoleon or Caesar.”

As he folded his coat he put his hand into the breast pocket and produced the unposted letter.

“That letter will drive me mad!  Shall I burn it?  What do I want with a wife?  I’ve plenty of money now.”

He held the letter to the flame of the candle.  But he could not burn it.

“This is too damned idiotic!” he thought, as he laid it on the table and prepared to get into bed; “I’m not going to carry that letter about all my life.  I must either post it or destroy it.”

Then the darkness became as if charged with a personality sweet and intense; it seemed to emanate from the letter which lay on the table, and to materialize strangely and inexplicably.  It was the fragrance of brown hair, and the light of youthful eyes; and in this perfume, and this light, he realized her entire person; every delicate defect of thinness.  She hung over him in all her girlishness, and he clasped her waist with his hands.

“How sweet she is!  There is none like her.”

Then wearying of the strained delight he remembered Belthorpe Park, now his.  Trees and gardens waved in his mind; downs and river lands floated, and he half imagined Lily there smiling upon them; and when he turned to the wall, resolute in his search for sleep, the perfume he knew her by, the savour of the skin, where the first faint curls begin, haunted in his hallucinations, and intruded beneath the bed-clothes.  One dream was so exquisite in its tenderness, so illusive was the enchanted image that lay upon his brain, that fearing to lose it, he strove to fix his dream with words, but no word pictured her eyes, or the ineffable love they expressed, and yet the sensation of both was for the moment quite real in his mind.  They were sitting in a little shady room; she was his wife, and she hung over him, sitting on his knee.  Her eyes were especially distinct and beautiful, and her arms—­those thin arms which he knew so well—­and that waist were clothed in a puritanic frock of some blue material.  His happiness thrilled him, and he lay staring into the darkness till the darkness withered, and the lines of the room appeared—­the wardrobe, the wash-hand-stand, and then the letter.  He rose from his bed.  In all-pervading grayness the world lay as if dead; not a whiff of smoke ascended, not a bird had yet begun, and the river, like a sheet of zinc, swirled between its low banks.