I had sensations, I had thoughts, I had visions, now--but they all
acted in the frightful self-concentration of delirium. The lapse of
time, the march of events, the alternation of day and night, the
persons who moved about me, the words they spoke, the offices of
kindness they did for me--all these were annihilated from the period
when I closed my eyes again, after having opened them for an instant
on my father, in my own study.

My first sensation (how soon it came after I had been brought home, I
know not) was of a terrible heat; a steady, blazing heat, which seemed
to have shrivelled and burnt up the whole of the little world around
me, and to have left me alone to suffer, but never to consume in it.
After this, came a quick, restless, unintermittent toiling of obscure
thought, ever in the same darkened sphere, ever on the same
impenetrable subject, ever failing to reach some distant and visionary
result. It was as if something were imprisoned in my mind, and moving
always to and fro in it--moving, but never getting free.

Soon, these thoughts began to take a form that I could recognise.

In the clinging heat and fierce seething fever, to which neither
waking nor sleeping brought a breath of freshness or a dream of
change, I began to act my part over again, in the events that had
passed, but in a strangely altered character. Now, instead of placing
implicit trust in others, as I had done; instead of failing to
discover a significance and a warning in each circumstance as it
arose, I was suspicious from the first--suspicious of Margaret, of her
father, of her mother, of Mannion, of the very servants in the house.
In the hideous phantasmagoria of my own calamity on which I now
looked, my position was reversed. Every event of the doomed year of my