fear of
madness, fear at the very least of perturbation such that Sally might
come, through it, to a knowledge that had to be kept from her at all
costs.

He lighted his candle with a cautious match, and found what might be
a solace--a lucky newspaper of the morning. If only he could read it
without audible rustling, unheard by the sleepers!

The print was almost too small to be read by the light of a single
candle; but there were the usual headings, the usual ranks of capitals
that tell us so quick that there is nothing we shall care about in
the pale undecipherable paragraphs below, and that we have spent our
halfpenny in vain. There was the usual young lady who had bought, or
was trying on, a large hat, and whose top-story above, in profile,
had got so far ahead of her other stories below. There were the
consignments of locust-flights of boots, for this young lady's
friends, with heels in the instep. And all the advertisements that
some one _must_ believe, or they would not pay for insertion; but that
_we_ ignore, incredulous. Fenwick tried hard, for his own sake, to
make the whole thing mean something, but his dazed brain and feverish
eyes refused to respond to his efforts, and he let the paper go, and
gave himself up, a prey to his own memories. After all, the daylight
was sure to come in the end to save him.

He tried hard to reason with himself, to force himself to feel the
reality of his own belief that all was well; for he had no doubt of
it, as an abstract truth. It was the power of getting comfort from it
that was wanting. If only his heart could stop thumping and his brain
burning, _he_ would have done the rejoicing that Rosalind was there,
knowing all he knew, and loving him; that Sally was there, loving him
too, but knowing nothing, and needing to know nothing; that one of
his first greetings in the day to come would be from Conrad Vereker,
probably too much intoxicated with his own happiness to give much
attention to what he was beginning to acknowledge was some kind of
physical or nervous fever. If he could only sleep!

But he could not--could hardly close his eyes. He said to himself
again and again that nothing was the matter; that, if anything, he and
Rosey were better off than they had been yet; that they had passed
through a land of peril to a great deliverance. But he did not believe
his own assurance, and the throng of memories that his feverish
condition would not let sleep, or that were it