rayer, madam,' he said, calmly:
'Argemone is dead.'

CHAPTER XVII: THE VALLEY OF THE SHADOW OF DEATH

Let us pass over the period of dull, stupefied misery that followed,
when Lancelot had returned to his lonely lodging, and the excitement
of his feelings had died away. It is impossible to describe that
which could not be separated into parts, in which there was no
foreground, no distance, but only one dead, black, colourless
present. After a time, however, he began to find that fancies,
almost ridiculously trivial, arrested and absorbed his attention;
even as when our eyes have become accustomed to darkness, every
light-coloured mote shows luminous against the void blackness of
night. So we are tempted to unseemly frivolity in churches, and at
funerals, and all most solemn moments; and so Lancelot found his
imagination fluttering back, half amused, to every smallest
circumstance of the last few weeks, as objects of mere curiosity,
and found with astonishment that they had lost their power of
paining him. Just as victims on the rack have fallen, it is said,
by length of torture, into insensibility, and even calm repose, his
brain had been wrought until all feeling was benumbed. He began to
think what an interesting autobiography his life might make; and the
events of the last few years began to arrange themselves in a most
attractive dramatic form. He began even to work out a scene or two,
and where 'motives' seemed wanting, to invent them here and there.
He sat thus for hours silent over his fire, playing with his old
self, as though it were a thing which did not belong to him--a suit
of clothes which he had put off, and which,

'For that it was too rich to hang by the wall,
It must be ripped,'

and then pieced and dizened out afresh as a toy. And then again he
started away from his own thoughts, at finding himself on the edge
of that very gulf, which, as Mellot had lately told him, Barnakill
denounced as the true hell of genius, where Art is regarded as an
end and not a means, and objects are interesting, not in as far as
they form our spirits, but in proportion as they can be shaped into
effective parts of some beautiful whole. But whether it was a
temptation or none, the desire recurred to him again and again. He
even attempted to write, but sickened at the sight of the first
words. He turned to his pencil, and tried to represent with it one
scene at l