CHAPTER VI. DESPERATE MEASURES. Fitful and feverish were the slumbers which visited Mr. Hawkehurst on that balmy summer's night. His waking hours were anxious and unhappy; but his sleeping hours were still more painful. To sleep was to be the feverish fool of vague wild visions, in which Charlotte and Dr. Doddleson, the editor of the _Cheapside_, the officials of the British Museum reading-room, Diana Paget, and the Sheldons, figured amidst inextricable confusion of circumstances and places. Throughout these wretched dreams he had some consciousness of himself and the room in which he was lying, the July moon shining upon him, broad and bright, through the diamond-paned lattice. And O, what torturing visions were those in which Charlotte smiled upon him, radiant with health and happiness; and there had been no such thing as her illness, no such thing as his grief. And then came hurried dreams, in which Dr. Doddleson was knocking at the farmhouse door, with the printer of the _Cheapside_. And then he was a spectator in a mighty theatre, large as those Roman amphitheatres, wherein the audience seemed a mass of flies, looking down on the encounter of two other flies, and all the glory of an imperial court only a little spot of purple and gold, gleaming afar in the sunshine. To the dreamer it was no surprise that this unknown theatre of his dreams should be vast as the gladiatorial arena. And then came the deep thunderous music of innumerable bass-viols and bassoons: and some one told him it was the first night of a great tragedy. He felt the breathless hush of expectation; the solemn bass music sank deeper; dark curtains were drawn aside, with a motion slow and solemn, like the waving of mountain pines, and there appeared a measureless stage, revealing a moonlit expanse, thickly studded with the white headstones of unnumbered graves, and on the foremost of these--revealed to him by what power he knew not, since mortal sight could never have reached a point so distant--he read the name of Charlotte Halliday. He awoke with a sharp cry of pain. It was broad day, and the waves were dancing gaily in the morning sunlight. He rose and dressed himself. Sleep, such as he had known that night, was worse than the weariest waking. He went out into the garden by-and-by, and paced slowly up and down the narrow pathways, beside which box of a century's growth rose dark and high. Pale yellow lights were in the upper windows. He wondered which of those sickly tapers flickered on the face he loved so fondly. "It is only a year since I first saw her," he thought: "one year! And to love her has been my 'liberal education;' to lose her would be my desolation and despair." To lose her! His thoughts approached that dread possibility, but could not realize it; not even yet. At eight o'clock Diana came to summon him to breakfast. "Shall I see Charlotte?" he asked. "No; for some time past she has not come down to breakfast." "What kind of night has she had?"