But perhaps it had been only his fancy that had called vengeance out of the night and set the hideous shapes of punishment before him.  Actual life was chaos, but there was something terribly logical in the imagination.  It was the imagination that set remorse to dog the feet of sin.  It was the imagination that made each crime bear its misshapen brood.  In the common world of fact the wicked were not punished, nor the good rewarded.  Success was given to the strong, failure thrust upon the weak.  That was all.  Besides, had any stranger been prowling round the house, he would have been seen by the servants or the keepers.  Had any foot-marks been found on the flower-beds, the gardeners would have reported it.  Yes, it had been merely fancy.  Sibyl Vane’s brother had not come back to kill him.  He had sailed away in his ship to founder in some winter sea.  From him, at any rate, he was safe.  Why, the man did not know who he was, could not know who he was.  The mask of youth had saved him.

And yet if it had been merely an illusion, how terrible it was to think that conscience could raise such fearful phantoms, and give them visible form, and make them move before one!  What sort of life would his be if, day and night, shadows of his crime were to peer at him from silent corners, to mock him from secret places, to whisper in his ear as he sat at the feast, to wake him with icy fingers as he lay asleep!  As the thought crept through his brain, he grew pale with terror, and the air seemed to him to have become suddenly colder.  Oh! in what a wild hour of madness he had killed his friend!  How ghastly the mere memory of the scene!  He saw it all again.  Each hideous detail came back to him with added horror.  Out of the black cave of time, terrible and swathed in scarlet, rose the image of his sin.  When Lord Henry came in at six o’clock, he found him crying as one whose heart will break.

It was not till the third day that he ventured to go out.  There was something in the clear, pine-scented air of that winter morning that seemed to bring him back his joyousness and his ardour for life.  But it was not merely the physical conditions of environment that had caused the change.  His own nature had revolted against the excess of anguish that had sought to maim and mar the perfection of its calm.  With subtle and finely wrought temperaments it is always so.  Their strong passions must either bruise or bend.  They either slay the man, or themselves die.  Shallow sorrows and shallow loves live on.  The loves and sorrows that are great are destroyed by their own plenitude.  Besides, he had convinced himself that he had been the victim of a terror-stricken imagination, and looked back now on his fears with something of pity and not a little of contempt.

After breakfast, he walked with the duchess for an hour in the garden and then drove across the park to join the shooting-party.  The crisp frost lay like salt upon the grass.  The sky was an inverted cup of blue metal.  A thin film of ice bordered the flat, reed-grown lake.