a
on the following day, his conscience was at rest; and he went to sleep
in the pleasant assurance that after having done something very hasty he
had just avoided doing something quite irreparable.

Lamberti had spent a less pleasant evening, and was not prepared for the
agreeable surprise that awaited him on the following morning in Guido's
note. He was neither indolent nor at all given to self-examination, and
he had generally found it a good plan to act upon impulse, and do what
he wished to do before it occurred to any one else to do the same thing;
and when he could not see what he ought to do, and was nevertheless sure
that he ought to act at once, he lost his temper with himself and
sometimes with other people.

He was afraid to go to bed that night, and he went to the club and
watched some of his friends playing cards until he could not keep his
eyes open; for gambling bored him to extinction. Then he walked the
whole length of the Corso and back, in the hope that the exercise might
prevent him from dreaming. But it only roused him again; and when he was
in his own room he stood nearly two hours at the open window, smoking
one cigar after another. At last he lay down without putting out the
light and read a French novel till it dropped from his hand, and he fell
asleep at four o'clock in the morning.

He was not visited by the dream that had disturbed his rest nightly for
a full fortnight. Possibly the doctor had been right after all, and the
habit was broken. At all events, what he remembered having felt when he
awoke was something quite new and not altogether unpleasant after the
first beginning, yet so strangely undefined that he would have found it
hard to describe it in any words.

He had no consciousness of any sort of shape or body belonging to him,
nor of motion, nor of sight, after the darkness had closed in upon him.
That moment, indeed, was terrible. It reminded him of the approach of a
cyclone in the West Indies, which he remembered well--the dreadful
stillness in the air; the long, sullen, greenish brown swell of the oily
sea; the appalling bank of solid darkness that moved upon the ship over
the noiseless waves; the shreds of black cloud torn forwards by an
unseen and unheard force, and the vast flashes of lightning that shot
upwards like columns of flame. He remembered the awful waiting.

Not a storm, then, but an instant change from something to nothing, with
consciousness preserved; complet