Under the flat, bud-pointed branches, I pressed on between clusters of primrose, celandine, and wild wood anemone, breathing in the earthy freshness of grass and moss. And presently I came out between the stones and jutting roots in sight of the vacant windows. I stood for a moment confronting their black regard, then descended the knoll and was soon making myself comfortable beside the garden house. But first I managed to clamber up on a fragment of the fallen masonry and peep in at its low windows. A few dead, last-year's flies lay dry on their backs; dusty, derelict spider-webs; a litter of straw, and a few potsherds--the place was empty. But it was mine, and the very remembrance of which it whispered to me--the picture of my poor father's bedroom that night of the storm--only increased my sense of possession. What was wrong with me just then, what I had sallied out in hope to be delivered from, was the unhappy conviction that my life was worthless, and I of no use in the world. I had taught myself to make knots in strings, but actual experience seemed to have proved that most human fumblings resulted only in "grannies" and not in the true lover's variety. They secured nothing, only tangled and jammed. I was young then, and yet as heavily burdened with other people's responsibilities as was poor Christian with the bundle of his sins. But my bundle, too, in that lovely, desolate loneliness at last fell off my shoulders. Could I not still be loyal in heart and mind to Fanny, even though now I knew how little she cared whether I was loyal or not? I even climbed up behind Mr Crimble's thick spectacles and looked down again at myself from that point of vantage. Whether or not I was his affair, I could try to make him mine--perhaps even persuade Fanny to love him. Oh, dear; was not every singing bird in that wilderness, every unfolding flower and sunlit March leaf welcoming the spirit within me to their quiet habitation? As if in response to this naïve thought, welled up in my memory the two last stanzas of my _Tom o' Bedlam_, which, either for pride or shame, had stuck in my throat on the skin mat in Lady Pollacke's sky-lit drawing-room:---- "With a heart of furious fancies, Whereof I am commander: With a burning spear, And a horse of air, To the wilderness I wander. With a knight of ghosts and shadows, I summoned am to tourney: Ten leagues beyond The wide world's end; Methinks it is no journey."