“There, that sordid, wizen old lady, a miser to judge by her appearance, she is eyeing me maliciously now, but I say all her eyeing is in vain; she pinched and scraped and starved herself for me.  Yes, I possess all your savings, and if you were fifty years younger you would not begrudge them to me.”

Laughing at his folly, Mike said, “How close together lie the sane and the insane; any one who had overheard me would have pronounced me mad as a March hare, and yet few are saner.”  He walked twice across the room.  “But I’m mad for the moment, and I like to be mad.  Have I not all things—­talent, wealth, love?  I asked for life, and I was given life.  I have drunk the cup—­no, not to the dregs, there is plenty more wine in the cup for me; the cup is full, I have not tasted it yet.  Lily! yes, I must get her; a fool I have been; my letter miscarried, else she would have written.  Refuse me! who would refuse me?  Yes, I was born to drink the cup of life as few have drunk it; I shall drink it even like a Roman emperor ...  But they drank it to madness and crime!  Yet even so; I shall drink of life even to crime.

“The peasant and the card-sharper shall go high, this impetus shall carry me very high; and Frank Escott, that mean cad, shall go to the gutter; but he is already there, and I am here!  I knew it would be so; I felt my destiny, I felt it here—­in my brain.  I felt it even when he scorned me in boyhood days.  I believe that in those days he expected me to touch my cap to him.  But those days are over, new days have begun.  When to-morrow’s sun rises it will shine on what is mine—­down-land, meadow-land, park-land, and wood-land.  Strange is the joy of possession; I did not know of its existence.  The stately house too is mine, and I would see it.  But that infernal servant, I suppose, is in bed.  I would not have him find me.  I shall get rid of him.  I can hear him saying in his pantry, ’He!  I wouldn’t give much for him; I found him last night spying about, examining his fine things, for all the world like a beggar to whom you had given an old suit of clothes.’”

Mike took his bed-room candle, and having regard for surprises on the part of the servants, he roamed about the passages, looking at the Chippendale furniture on the landings and the pictures and engravings that lined the walls.  Fearing bells, he did not attempt to enter any of the rooms, and it was with some difficulty that he found his way back to the library.  Throwing himself into the arm-chair, he wondered if he should grow accustomed to spend his evenings in this loneliness.  He thought of whom he should invite there—­Harding, Thompson, John Norton; certainly he would ask John.  He couldn’t ask Frank without his wife, and Lizzie would prejudice him in the eyes of the county people.  Then, as his thoughts detached themselves, he exclaimed against the sepulchral solemnity of the library.  The house was soundless.  At the window he heard the soft moonlight-dreaming of the rooks; and when he threw open the window the white peacock roosting there flew away and paraded on the pale sward like a Watteau lady.