enwick was certainly not in a position to gauge his own feelings
towards Mrs. Nightingale. All previous experience was cut away from
him, or seemed so. He might have been, for anything he knew, a married
man with a family, a devoted husband. He might have been recently
wedded to an adoring bride, and she might now be heart-broken in her
loneliness. How could he tell? The only thing that gave him courage
about this was that he _could_ remember the fact that he had had
parents, brothers, sisters. He could not recollect _anything whatever_
about sweetheart, wife, or child. Unearthly gusts of half-ideas came
to him at times, like that of the girl and the dog-cart. But they only
gave him pain, and went away unsolved, leaving him sick and dizzy.

His situation was an acutely distressing one. He was shackled and
embarrassed, so to speak, by what he knew of his relations to
existence. At any moment a past might be sprung on him, bringing him
suddenly face to face with God knows what. So strongly did he feel
this that he often said to himself that the greatest boon that could
be granted to him would be an assurance of continued oblivion. He was
especially afflicted by memories of an atrocious clearness that would
come to him in dreams, the horror of which would remain on into his
waking time. They were not necessarily horrible things at all, but
their clearness in the dream, and their total, if slow, disappearance
as the actual world came back, became sometimes an excruciating
torment. Who could say that they, or some equivalents, might not reach
him out of the past to-day or to-morrow--any time?

For instance, he had one morning waked up in a perfect agony--a cold
perspiration as of the worst nightmares--because of a dream harmless
enough in itself. He had suddenly remembered, in the dream-street he
could identify the houses of so plainly, a first-floor he had occupied
where he had left all his furniture locked up years ago. And he had
found the house and the first-floor quite easily, and had not seen
anything strange in the landlord saying that he and his old woman
often wondered when Mr. Fenwick would come for his things. It was not
the accumulation of rent unpaid, nor that of the dirt he knew he
should find on the furniture (all of which he could recollect in the
dream perfectly well), but the fact that he had forgotten it all, and
left it unclaimed all those years, that excruciated him. Even his
having to negotiate for its