The baffled fury and prostrate hope--for at the moment I fully believed him--were too much for my reeling brain and fasting body. For one minute’s command of my faculties, I would have sold them for ever; but I felt them ebbing from me, as the life does from a wound. The hemispheres of my brain were parting one from the other, and a grey void spreading between them. I tried to think, but could not. I strove to say _anything_, but failed. Fainter and fainter grew the room, the lamp, the ceiling, the face at which I tried to look. Things went to and fro with a quicker quiver, like flame in the wind, then, round and round like whirling water; my mouth grew stiff, and the tongue between my teeth felt like a glove; and with a rush of sound in my brain and throat, and a scream pent up, yet bursting, I fell, as I thought, through the earth. I was only on the floor, in a fit. When I came to myself, I was in my own bed, and my own dear mother bending over me, pale, and haggard, and full of tears. The broad daylight was around us, and the faint sunshine on her face. She had been with me ever since. In my weakness, I looked up at her with a pang of self-reproach, to think how little I had valued her love; and I vowed to myself to make up for it by future care and devotion. That violent convulsion, and the illness after it, changed me not a little both in mind and body. CHAPTER XI. It was indeed high time for me to cherish my mother. Her pain at leaving the place where she had known her little all of happiness--for her childhood had been overcast with trouble--her pain was so acute and overpowering that all my deep impassioned feelings sunk reproved before it. My guardian now seemed much embittered against me, and anxious for our departure. He came once or twice, in my illness, to ask for and to see me; and he brought back, unperceived by any one, the weapon for which I raved. But ere I was quite recovered, he wrote, requesting to see me on business in his study. I could not speak yet without pain, having bitten my tongue severely. "Your mother shall have a home here," he said, "as long as ever she wants one; but as for you, malignant or mad, I will try no more to soften you. When first I saw you in your early childhood, you flew at me as a murderer. Soon after you ransacked my cupboards and stole my boots, to compare them with some impressions or casts you kept. Yes, you look astonished. I never told you of it, but I knew it for all that. Of those absurdities I thought little, for I regarded them as the follies of a mad child, and I pitied you deeply, and even liked you for your filial devotion. But now I find that you have grown up in the same belief, and you dare even now to avow it. You know that I have no fear of you." "Then why had you got that pistol?" I saw that he was vexed and surprised at my having perceived it.