When the barrister came to consciousness, he found himself lying in a bed in an unfamiliar place, a small, light-coloured room, with only the most indispensable articles of furniture in it. His brain was too deranged by the effect of the poison to allow him to speculate where he might be and how he got there. To think was agony, and sent his head whirling round with a dizzy sickness and horror. His reason returned to him in fitful glimpses only, and then he realised that he was in a room, in bed, and that people who were strangers to him came in and out. But all around him was changing and indistinct and full of confused noise, and the bed and room seemed to shake and heave beneath him as if he were on some small craft tossing on a stormy sea. Then all the real faded away from his vision, and his mind set forth to travel through a land of phantoms. The delusions of delirium vary much with the individual. The finer the fabric of the mind, the more vivid, the less gross become the wandering fancies; and all the learning and experiences and ideas of its past are wrought by the disordered brain into long and complicated histories of agony, all the store-house of the memory is ransacked for instruments of torture. Again, it may have happened in his case that the poison administered by Susan Riley in some way modified the effects of the alcohol; but, whatever the cause, his delirium did not assume the form generally produced by drink. He passed through a long series of strange and highly imaginative dreams, all full of terrible and consistent adventures of calamity; and the key-note of every one of these dreams was WOMAN. In every one was some beautiful evil female form that tempted him on into varieties of new and indescribably horrible ruin. The dominant idea, the morbid bias of his mind, coloured each delusion. * * * * * A desolate coast in the extreme sad North; along the sea stretches a narrow beach of black rocks; behind this tower huge mountains, bare of any vegetation, cloven by black ravines streaked here and there with the ghastly white snow. It is the region of eternal death, of endless winter sprinkling daily snows to be the sport of the Arctic hurricane. A leaden-coloured sea moans incessantly on the dismal beach, and on it sail fast to the southward, silently, great icebergs riven from the mountains by the storms. And beyond the lea of the shore, the sea breaks and shivers beneath the keen blast that sweeps down the dayless gorges from the awful glaciers. And there is no horizon anywhere around, for above is a sky of rolling clouds through which the sun never shines, and the mists of the mountain-tops mingle with the clouds of the sky, and so, too, does the sullen haze that lies on the grey sea. It is the region of death--no life, no light, no love.