how the countenance which tells of
present cheerfulness or glad onward-looking; there was no spring in his
step; his voice had fallen to a lower key, and often he spoke with
that hesitation in choice of words which may be noticed in persons whom
defeat has made self-distrustful. Ceaseless perplexity and dread gave a
wandering, sometimes a wild, expression to his eyes.

He seldom slept, in the proper sense of the word; as a rule he was
conscious all through the night of 'a kind of fighting' between physical
weariness and wakeful toil of the mind. It often happened that some
wholly imaginary obstacle in the story he was writing kept him under
a sense of effort throughout the dark hours; now and again he woke,
reasoned with himself, and remembered clearly that the torment was
without cause, but the short relief thus afforded soon passed in the
recollection of real distress. In his unsoothing slumber he talked
aloud, frequently wakening Amy; generally he seemed to be holding a
dialogue with someone who had imposed an intolerable task upon him; he
protested passionately, appealed, argued in the strangest way about
the injustice of what was demanded. Once Amy heard him begging for
money--positively begging, like some poor wretch in the street; it
was horrible, and made her shed tears; when he asked what he had been
saying, she could not bring herself to tell him.

When the striking clocks summoned him remorselessly to rise and work
he often reeled with dizziness. It seemed to him that the greatest
happiness attainable would be to creep into some dark, warm corner, out
of the sight and memory of men, and lie there torpid, with a blessed
half-consciousness that death was slowly overcoming him. Of all the
sufferings collected into each four-and-twenty hours this of rising to a
new day was the worst.

The one-volume story which he had calculated would take him four or five
weeks was with difficulty finished in two months. March winds made an
invalid of him; at one time he was threatened with bronchitis, and for
several days had to abandon even the effort to work. In previous winters
he had been wont to undergo a good deal of martyrdom from the London
climate, but never in such a degree as now; mental illness seemed to
have enfeebled his body.

It was strange that he succeeded in doing work of any kind, for he had
no hope from the result. This one last effort he would make, just to
complete the undeniableness of his failure, a