ere
ghosts, intangible, not of his world. Sometimes, amid a crowd of human
beings, he was stricken voiceless and motionless: he stared about him,
and was bewildered, asking himself what it all meant.

His health was not good; he suffered much from headaches; he fell into
languors, lassitude of body and soul. As a result, imagination seemed
to be dead in him. The torments of desire were forgotten. When he heard
that Irene Derwent had returned to London, the news affected him only
with a sort of weary curiosity. Was it true that she would not marry
Arnold Jacks? It seemed so. He puzzled over the story, wondered about
it; but only his mind was concerned, never his emotions.

Once he was summoned to Queen's Gate. John Jacks lay on a sofa, in his
bedroom; he talked as usual, but in a weaker voice, and had the face of
a man doomed. Piers saw no one else in the house, and on going away
felt that he had been under that roof for the last time.

His mind was oppressed with the thought of death. As happens, probably,
to every imaginative man at one time or another, he had a conviction
that his own days were drawing to a premature close. Speculation about
the future seemed idle; he had come to the end of hopes and fears.
Night after night his broken sleep suffered the same dream; he saw Mrs.
Hannaford, who stretched her hands to him, and with a face of silent
woe seemed to implore his help. Help against Death; and his
powerlessness wrung his heart with anguish. Waking, he thought of all
the women--beautiful, tender, objects of infinite passion and
worship--who even at that moment lay smitten by the great destroyer;
the gentle, the loving, racked, disfigured, flung into the horror of
the grave. And his being rose in revolt; he strove in silent agony
against the dark ruling of the world.

One day there was of tranquil self-possession, of blessed calm. A
Sunday in January, when, he knew not how, he found himself amid the
Sussex lanes, where he had rambled in the time of harvest. The weather,
calm and dry and mild, but without sunshine, soothed his spirit. He
walked for hours, and towards nightfall stood upon a wooded hill,
gazing westward. An overcast, yet not a gloomy sky; still,
soft-dappled; with rifts and shimmerings of pearly blue scattered among
multitudinous billows, which here were a dusky yellow, there a deep
neutral tint. In the low west, beneath the long dark edge, a soft
splendour, figured with airy cloudlets, waited f