Every one had changed--the whole world--the very cause itself. All had left him in his hour of need--all had turned upon him and betrayed and deserted him. Months of solitary brooding, the delirium of fever, the overwrought nervous condition into which imprisonment had driven him, had all combined to produce in Saul a distorted image of life, of the world, and of every single being in it. Hitherto he had locked these feelings in his own heart; but now, before Eustace, the one man who had proffered him friendship in the midst of his trouble, the friendship of comrade to comrade, man to man, it all came pouring out in one great flood of impassioned eloquence and imprecation, terrible sometimes to listen to. It was not easy at times even to follow his rapid speech, which alternated between the roughest vernacular and the purest English he had ever spoken, rehearsed a hundred times in his prison-house, as he had prepared the speeches which were to raise all Devon and Cornwall to arms, if need be, against the monstrous class tyranny under which the country lay groaning. Eustace let him have his fling, never stopping him by argument or opposition, leading him on by a sympathetic word now and again to outpour everything that was in his heart without fear. He knew by instinct what the relief would be, how much good it would do for the outlet to be found at length; and though unable to repress a sense of shuddering loathing at some of the words of his companion, he could well excuse them in the thought of his great sufferings and state of mental distraction, and was very hopeful by slow degrees of winning him back to a better and more reasonable frame of mind.