But as he tossed in bed the past rose up before him in vivid colours, bringing with it wafts of old sentiment and tremors of old emotions. Scenes of happiness and of error revealed themselves to him bathed in light. Faces rose out of the past and looked at him reproachfully. Perhaps an old fibre in his heart that had once quivered with love was again in vibration. 'Poor Jane,' he said, and turned in his four-post bed. 'Poor Jane, would that I could but see her, myself unseen, once again.' Then he racked his brain devising impossible schemes for catching a glimpse of her without allowing himself to be recognised. Next he fell to wondering what his child was like, a child he had never seen, never held in his arms, never kissed, and, in a manner strange to him, he was aware of a void within. He became conscious, as he never had been before, of responsibility, of the terrible truth that not only had he marred his own happiness, but that he had brought about the ruin of another, an innocent victim; and in addition that he would have his child's soul to answer for. He turned again in bed. A fire burned in the grate. It made strange figures on the wall. Reflections as eyes winked at him, a shadow like an arm seemed to be warning or reproaching him with extended finger. He raised himself in bed to draw the curtains to exclude this shadow, but they would not meet, and still between them he could see the hand stretched forth signing to him. Unable to account for it, he left his bed, went to the hearth, and found that the shadow was caused by the handle of a saucepan left on the hob at his desire to furnish him with warm water in the morning. Having arranged the pan that its shadow should no longer offend him, he returned between the sheets, fell into an aimless, unhappy tangle of hopes and fears, lapsed into sleep, and if, before dawn, he heard the knocking of the maid at the door, took it as a portion of his troubled dream, was not roused, and slept on, not to awake till full two hours after the coach had gone. There was now no help for it. He must spend another day at Seaton. If he posted to Axmouth, it would not avail him, he would be too late on reaching that place to catch the London mail-coach. He dressed leisurely, resigned to the situation, and as usual was careful and painstaking about his clothing. He sent for the village barber to shave his lip and chin, to curl his whiskers, and adjust his hair so as to disguise incipient baldness. Then he descended, very spick-and-span, dangling his gold-rimmed glass on his finger, to the coffee-room, and rang for breakfast.