Yes!  And all this rational explanation of the fantastic made it only more mysterious and weird.  There was something daemonic in that dream.  It was one of those experiences which throw a man out of conformity with the established order of his kind and make him a creature of obscure suggestions.

Henceforth, without ever trying to resist, he went every afternoon to the house where she lived.  He went there as passively as if in a dream.  He could never make out how he had attained the footing of intimacy in the Dunster mansion above the bay—­whether on the ground of personal merit or as the pioneer of the vegetable silk industry.  It must have been the last, because he remembered distinctly, as distinctly as in a dream, hearing old Dunster once telling him that his next public task would be a careful survey of the Northern Districts to discover tracts suitable for the cultivation of the silk plant.  The old man wagged his beard at him sagely.  It was indeed as absurd as a dream.

Willie of course would be there in the evening.  But he was more of a figure out of a nightmare, hovering about the circle of chairs in his dress-clothes like a gigantic, repulsive, and sentimental bat.  “Do away with the beastly cocoons all over the world,” he buzzed in his blurred, water-logged voice.  He affected a great horror of insects of all kinds.  One evening he appeared with a red flower in his button-hole.  Nothing could have been more disgustingly fantastic.  And he would also say to Renouard:  “You may yet change the history of our country.  For economic conditions do shape the history of nations.  Eh?  What?” And he would turn to Miss Moorsom for approval, lowering protectingly his spatulous nose and looking up with feeling from under his absurd eyebrows, which grew thin, in the manner of canebrakes, out of his spongy skin.  For this large, bilious creature was an economist and a sentimentalist, facile to tears, and a member of the Cobden Club.

In order to see as little of him as possible Renouard began coming earlier so as to get away before his arrival, without curtailing too much the hours of secret contemplation for which he lived.  He had given up trying to deceive himself.  His resignation was without bounds.  He accepted the immense misfortune of being in love with a woman who was in search of another man only to throw herself into his arms.  With such desperate precision he defined in his thoughts the situation, the consciousness of which traversed like a sharp arrow the sudden silences of general conversation.  The only thought before which he quailed was the thought that this could not last; that it must come to an end.  He feared it instinctively as a sick man may fear death.  For it seemed to him that it must be the death of him followed by a lightless, bottomless pit.  But his resignation was not spared the torments of jealousy:  the cruel, insensate, poignant, and imbecile jealousy, when it seems that a woman betrays us simply by this that she exists, that she breathes—­and when the deep movements of her nerves or her soul become a matter of distracting suspicion, of killing doubt, of mortal anxiety.