exactly what it was.  My heart made all at once a sudden leap in my breast.  I am aware that this language is figurative, and that the heart cannot leap; but it is a figure so entirely justified by sensation, that no one will have any difficulty in understanding what I mean.  My heart leaped up and began beating wildly in my throat, in my ears, as if my whole being had received a sudden and intolerable shock.  The sound went through my head like the dizzy sound of some strange mechanism, a thousand wheels and springs circling, echoing, working in my brain.  I felt the blood bound in my veins, my mouth became dry, my eyes hot; a sense of something insupportable took possession of me.  I sprang to my feet, and then I sat down again.  I cast a quick glance round me beyond the brief circle of the lamplight, but there was nothing there to account in any way for this sudden extraordinary rush of sensation, nor could I feel any meaning in it, any suggestion, any moral impression.  I thought I must be going to be ill, and got out my watch and felt my pulse:  it was beating furiously, about one hundred and twenty-five throbs in a minute.  I knew of no illness that could come on like this without warning, in a moment, and I tried to subdue myself, to say to myself that it was nothing, some flutter of the nerves, some physical disturbance.  I laid myself down upon my sofa to try if rest would help me, and kept still, as long as the thumping and throbbing of this wild, excited mechanism within, like a wild beast plunging and struggling, would let me.  I am quite aware of the confusion of the metaphor; the reality was just so.  It was like a mechanism deranged, going wildly with ever-increasing precipitation, like those horrible wheels that from time to time catch a helpless human being in them and tear him to pieces; but at the same time it was like a maddened living creature making the wildest efforts to get free.

When I could bear this no longer I got up and walked about my room; then having still a certain command of myself, though I could not master the commotion within me, I deliberately took down an exciting book from the shelf, a book of breathless adventure which had always interested me, and tried with that to break the spell.  After a few minutes, however, I flung the book aside; I was gradually losing all power over myself.  What I should be moved to do,—­to shout aloud, to struggle with I know not what; or if I was going mad altogether, and next moment must be a raving lunatic,—­I could not tell.  I kept looking round, expecting I don’t know what; several times with the corner of my eye I seemed to see a movement, as if some one was stealing out of sight; but when I looked straight, there was never anything but the plain outlines of the wall and carpet, the chairs standing in good order.  At last I snatched up the lamp in my hand, and went out of the room.  To look at the picture, which had been faintly showing in my imagination from time to time, the eyes, more anxious than ever, looking at me from out the silent air?  But no; I passed the door of that room swiftly, moving, it seemed, without any volition of my own, and before I knew where I was going, went into my father’s library with my lamp in my hand.