night-light, and the nurse saw his shadow projected, grotesque and
threatening, on the white traceries of the ceiling. But he made no sound,
and never looked at the nurse. He stood surveying young Faversham for
some time, as he lay hot and haggard with fever, yet sleeping under the
power of morphia. And at last, without a word, the nurse saw her
formidable visitor depart.

Melrose returned to his own quarters. The window of his room was open,
and outside the great mountains, in a dewy dawn, were beginning to show
purple through dim veils of silvery cloud. He stood still, looking out.
His mind was churning like a yeasty sea. Old facts came to the surface;
faces once familiar; the form and countenance of a brother drowned at
twenty in Sandford lasher on the Oxford Thames; friends of his early
manhood, riding beside him to hounds, or over the rolling green of the
Campagna. Old instincts long suppressed, yet earlier and more primitive
in him than those of the huckster and the curio-hunter, stirred uneasily.
It was true that he was getting old, and had been too long alone. He
thought with vindictive bitterness of Netta, who had robbed and deserted
him. And then, again, of his involuntary guest.

The strangest medley of ideas ran through his mind. Self-pity;
recollections connected with habits on which he had deliberately turned
his back some thirty years before--the normal pleasures, friendships,
occupations of English society; fanatical hatred and resentment--against
two women in particular, the first of whom had, in his opinion,
deliberately spoilt his life by a double cruelty, while the second--his
wife--whom he had plucked up out of poverty, and the dust-heap of her
disreputable relations, had ungratefully and wickedly rebelled against
and deserted him.