the powers fitting him for battle. A man such as Alvan, arrested on his
career by an opposition to his enrolment of a bride!--think of it! What
was this girl in a life like his? But, oh! the question was no sooner
asked than the thought that this girl had been in this room illuminated
the room, telling him she might have been his own this instant,
confounding him with an accusation of madness for rejecting her.
Why had he done it? Surely women, weak women, must be at times divinely
inspired. She warned him against the step. But he, proud of his
armoury, went his way. He choked, he suffered the torture of the mailed
Genoese going under; worse, for the drowner's delirium swirls but a
minute in the gaping brain, while he had to lie all, night at the mercy
of the night.

He was only calmer when morning came. Night has little mercy for the
self-reproachful, and for a strong man denouncing the folly of his error,
it has none. The bequest of the night was a fever of passion; and upon
that fever the light of morning cleared his head to weigh the force
opposing him. He gnawed the paradox, that it was huge because it was
petty, getting a miserable sour sustenance out of his consciousness of
the position it explained. Great enemies, great undertakings, would have
revived him as they had always revived and fortified. But here was a
stolid small obstacle, scarce assailable on its own level; and he had
chosen that it should be attacked through its own laws and forms. By
shutting a door, by withholding an answer to his knocks, the thing
reduced him to hesitation. And the thing had weapons to shoot at him;
his history, his very blood, stood open to its shafts; and the sole
quality of a giant, which he could show to front it, was the breath of
one for a mark.

These direct perceptions of the circumstances were played on by the fever