no reason, so it now appeared, why he should go downstairs again. Maud and her poaching friend would talk about fishing for awhile, and then he--ah, yes! Bertie Cochrane--would go away. They would both easily understand his own non-appearance. He had suffered tortures; no inquisitor or master of the rack would refuse to grant him this little rest and compensation. Then for a moment his breeding and the habit of his whole life jerked him to his feet, with the intention of rejoining them, as courtesy and decorum demanded. But the drug he had taken was already more powerful than they. It told him with authority that this ecstasy of consciousness would be trespassed on and interfered with by the presence of others. It would, if he went downstairs, be necessary for him to some extent to give attention to them instead of letting himself be absorbed in the exquisiteness of his own sensations. And those sensations had nothing in common with the dulled perceptions of sleep or intoxication. He was lifted onto a plane more vivified than the normal; he basked in super-solar sunlight. Then, still without any suggestion of sleepiness or intoxicated consciousness, the most wonderful visions, or, rather, the intentional visualisation of scenes and moods magic in their beauty, passed in front of him. He, turned into Keats himself, was listening to the nightingale, and losing himself in "embalmed darkness" to the charmed music of the immortal song. "The weariness, the fever and the fret," were remembered only as the traveller arrived at his long-desired home remembers the weariness of the way. His spirit seemed to draw away from life, though still intensely living, and he was in love with death, that but loosed it from the impediment of the body. Then a curve was suddenly turned, and next moment he was mounting higher than the blithe spirit of the lark could carry it, and hung in some clear interstellar ether so remote that the sun above him and the earth below seemed about equal in size, and the shape of England and the coasts of Europe were visible as in a map, set in dim blue sea. Then, still mounting, he turned his eye upward, and looked undazzled into the high noon of the heavens, and yet, though it was noon, the infinite velvet vault was sown with the sparkle of stars. Sun and stars shone there together, and a slip of crescent moon made the company of heaven complete.