the feet of
sin. It was the imagination that made each crime bear its misshapen
brood. In the common world of fact the wicked were not punished, nor the
good rewarded. Success was given to the strong, failure thrust upon the
weak. That was all. Besides, had any stranger been prowling round the
house he would have been seen by the servants or the keepers. Had any
footmarks been found on the flower-beds, the gardeners would have
reported it. Yes: it had been merely fancy. Sibyl Vane's brother had not
come back to kill him. He had sailed away in his ship to founder in some
winter sea. From him, at any rate, he was safe. Why, the man did not
know who he was, could not know who he was. The mask of youth had saved
him.

And yet if it had been merely an illusion, how terrible it was to think
that conscience could raise such fearful phantoms, and give them visible
form, and make them move before one! What sort of life would his be, if
day and night, shadows of his crime were to peer at him from silent
corners, to mock him from secret places, to whisper in his ear as he sat
at the feast, to wake him with icy fingers as he lay asleep! As the
thought crept through his brain, he grew pale with terror, and the air
seemed to him to have become suddenly colder. Oh! in what a wild hour of
madness he had killed his friend! How ghastly the mere memory of the
scene! He saw it all again. Each hideous detail came back to him with
added horror. Out of the black cave of Time, terrible and swathed in
scarlet, rose the image of his sin. When Lord Henry came in at six
o'clock, he found him crying as one whose heart will break.

It was not till the third day that he ventured to go out. There was
something in the clear, pine-scented air of that winter morning that
seemed to bring him back his joyousness and his ardour for life. But it
was not merely the physical conditions of environment that had caused
the change. His own nature had revolted against the excess of anguish
that had sought to maim and mar the perfection of its calm. With subtle
and finely-wrought temperaments it is always so. Their strong passions
must either bruise or bend. They either slay the man, or themselves die.
Shallow sorrows and shallow loves live on. The loves and sorrows that
are great are destroyed by their own plenitude. Besides, he had
convinced himself that he had been the victim of a terror-stricken
imagination, and looked back now on his fears with something of p