April 16.--No further news yet from the Argonaut. I can only anticipate the worst. Nothing but rain without, and this intolerable suspense in one's mind. I can neither work nor think. * * * * * April 17.--To-day the weather has changed, and see how this barometer of my nerves registers the change! I have been walking in Regent's Park, the nearest country, and I feel singularly good, wise, and happy. That uninteresting park, uninteresting in itself, has a gift of refreshment, as one turns into it out of the streets. I find myself leaning against the railing to watch a little dark creature with red legs and a red bill, that swims between the swans, and clambers up on the grass, and runs about there stealthily with a shy grace. There is an island, to which all the water-birds go, and it is grown over with trees and bushes and green weeds, down to the edge of the water, and they go there when they want to be alone, as one goes into a deep wood, out of the streets in which people stare. To-day I was perfectly happy, merely walking about the park. I sat under a tree for half an hour, and it was only when I realised that a queer sound which had come to me at intervals, a mournful and deep cry, which I had heard in a kind of dream, was the crying of the wild beasts, over yonder, inside their bars, that I got up and came away. I have gone back to my journal at three o'clock in the morning, because I cannot sleep, and one of my old horrors has taken hold of me again. I am writing in order to give myself almost a sense of companionship: this talking to oneself on paper is so different from the loud emptiness of the night, when one is awake, and one's thoughts cry out. I woke up suddenly, and felt the darkness about me, like a horrible oppression. I felt as I have sometimes felt when the train has been carrying me through a long tunnel. All the blood went to my head, as if I were stifling, and I had a need of daylight. I turned on the electric light, but it made no difference; it was no more than the light in the railway-carriage while the darkness is thundering about one's ears, I had the sensation of a world in which the daylight had been blotted out, and men stumbled in a perpetual night, which the lamps did but make visible. I felt that I should not be able to go on breathing unless I thrust the thought out of my mind, and I got up and turned on all the lights and walked to and fro in the rooms, and then came in here to quiet myself in the way I have found so good, by writing down all these fears and scruples of mine, as coldly as I can, as if they belonged to somebody else, in whose psychology I am interested. Already the uneasiness has almost left me. And yet who knows if I am only wrapping the blanket round my head once more, in order that I may run through fire and not see it? * * * * *