The high spirits that had seized him on that first rainy morning of his freedom often came and snatched him up again, but they always dropped him back into a depression that was almost horror. He had moments of crazy gaiety and uproariousness, of sheer animal delight in his bodily freedom; but behind them all lurked the consciousness that he was still in prison. He had been sentenced for life. He was shut up in some dreary place, away from the farm, away from Len and Janey. He might work on the farm the whole day, and fool with his brother and sister the whole evening, but he knew none the less that he was shut up away from them all. During this time he had peculiar dreams. He often fell asleep full of fury and despair, but his dreams were always of sunlit spaces, children and flowers. Again and again in them appeared the little girl Ivy--not dirty and cross, but lovely and fresh and winsome, smiling and beckoning. It seemed as if behind all the horrors and fogs of his life something divine and innocent was calling--at times it was comfort and peace and healing to him, at others it was the chief of his torments. The Furlongers had always lived aloofly at Sparrow Hall--scorned, even before their downfall, by their own class, they had nevertheless not sought comrades in the classes beneath them. They had always sufficed one another, and had not cared for the distractions of over-the-fence gossip or the public-house. However, since his return from Parkhurst, Nigel had realised a certain tendency on the part of labourers and small farmers to seek him out and claim equal terms. This was not merely due to the consciousness of his degradation, the delight of patronising the proud Furlonger--its chief motive was a strange sort of deference. Socially, his crime had reduced him to their level, but morally it had given him an exaltation which had never been his before. He now belonged to that world of which they caught rare dazzling glimpses in their Sunday papers. He was only a rank below Crippen in their hero-worship, and when they met him in the village they stared at him in much the same way as they stared at the murderer's photograph in _The People_.