Oliver, now lying with closed eyes on his sofa, lived again through the sensations and impressions of that first hour: the pain--the arrival of the doctor--the injection of morphia--the blessed relief stealing through his being--and then Alicia's face beside him. Delivered from the obsession of intolerable anguish, he had been free to notice with a kind of exultation the tears in the girl's eyes, her pale tremor and silence. Never yet had Alicia wept for _him_ or anything that concerned him. Never, indeed, had he seen her weep in his whole life before. He triumphed in her tears. Since then, however, their whole relation had insensibly and radically changed; their positions toward each other were reversed. Till the day of his injury and his defeat, Marsham had been in truth the wooed and Alicia the wooer. Now it seemed to him as though, through his physical pain, he were all the time clinging to something that shrank away and resisted him--something that would ultimately elude and escape him. He knew well that Alicia liked sickness and melancholy no more than he did; and he was constantly torn between a desire to keep her near him and a perception that to tie her to his sick-room was, in fact, the worst of policies. Persistently, in the silence of the hot room, there rang through his brain the questions: "Do I really care whether she stays or goes?--do I love her?--shall I ever marry her?" Questions that were immediately answered, it seemed, by the rise of a wave of desolate and desperate feeling. He was maimed and ruined; life had broken under his feet. What if also he were done forever with love and marriage? There were still some traces in his veins of the sedative drug which had given him a few hours' sleep during the night. Under its influence a feverish dreaminess overtook him, alive with fancies and images. Ferrier and Diana were among the phantoms that peopled the room. He saw Ferrier come in, stoop over the newspaper on the floor, raise it, and walk toward the fire with it. The figure stood with its back to him; then suddenly it turned, and Marsham saw the well-known face, intent, kindly, a little frowning, as though in thought, but showing no consciousness of his, Oliver's, presence or plight. He himself wished to speak, but was only aware of useless effort and some intangible hinderance. Then Ferrier moved on toward a writing-table with drawers that stood beyond the fireplace. He stooped, and touched a handle. "No!" cried Oliver, violently--"no!" He woke with shock and distress, his pulse racing. But the feverish state began again, and dreams with it--of the House of Commons, the election, the faces in the Hartingfield crowd. Diana was among the crowd--looking on--vaguely beautiful and remote. Yet as he perceived her a rush of cool air struck on his temples, he seemed to be walking down a garden, there was a scent of limes and roses. "Oliver!" said his mother's voice beside him--"dear Oliver!"