"Ah, if all were only a dream!" he exclaimed sadly, as he lay thinking of nights. And then he would try to believe that he had not met Lady Betty again, had never even heard of her since her wedding-day. He had never made the acquaintance of the Robinsons, had never set foot in their great ugly house at the corner. Were not all these things the fancies of a disordered imagination, and was he not still here in Hampstead, in his narrow iron bed up on the gallery? To-morrow he would jump up and make his miserable breakfast as usual, would think of working without being able to raise a hand, and would potter away the hours. And at six in the evening he would see his prosperous neighbour from the City go past with noiseless, gentle step, bearing a plaited rush-bag with a skewer thrust through it. Yet what a relief to throw off the illusions of these latter days, and find himself again as of old, free of all the tangle; even though the problem of bread still faced him, and the vista of hopeless days stretched away endlessly! Alas! the morning light, filling his panelled bedroom and revealing to his eyes the many luxuries of these prosperous days, testified only too convincingly to the reality of recent developments. And yet, as he turned up the well-known Hampstead street of an evening on his way to the Robinsons, he would still struggle again to recover the illusion that the old days were yet. Approaching the house as it loomed in the near distance through the wintry mist, he would imagine himself supremely unconcerned with it. And then he would stop outside his own former door, and fumble in his pocket a moment as if to find the key. Like lessons learnt after the mind is set, all these later accretions to his existence were ready to drop away, to have a shadowy relation to him. It made him realise with astonishment how easily he might cut the Robinsons out of his life, and proceed as if he had never known them. His bond of obligation was more real to him than the people to whom he was bound! He was shrewd enough to see that in his heart of hearts he was sullenly and perpetually angry that so much had come to him from so extraneous a source. Where his own strength and gifts had failed, these people from a world that was not his world, either in thought or mode, had come in and brought him prosperity. This galling sense of absolute dependence on the Robinsons seemed the deepest humiliation he had known. They had given him food when he was nigh starvation; they had given work when the prospect of work had vanished--had showered on him benefits and kindnesses innumerable. They had restored him to society and to the world of art and letters. He owed them the confidence of his bearing before the world, the manly swing of his step, the pride of his glance.