But, oh! the question was no sooner asked than the thought that this girl had been in this room illuminated the room, telling him she might have been his own this instant, confounding him with an accusation of madness for rejecting her.  Why had he done it?  Surely women, weak women, must be at times divinely inspired.  She warned him against the step.  But he, proud of his armoury, went his way.  He choked, he suffered the torture of the mailed Genoese going under; worse, for the drowner’s delirium swirls but a minute in the gaping brain, while he had to lie all, night at the mercy of the night.

He was only calmer when morning came.  Night has little mercy for the self-reproachful, and for a strong man denouncing the folly of his error, it has none.  The bequest of the night was a fever of passion; and upon that fever the light of morning cleared his head to weigh the force opposing him.  He gnawed the paradox, that it was huge because it was petty, getting a miserable sour sustenance out of his consciousness of the position it explained.  Great enemies, great undertakings, would have revived him as they had always revived and fortified.  But here was a stolid small obstacle, scarce assailable on its own level; and he had chosen that it should be attacked through its own laws and forms.  By shutting a door, by withholding an answer to his knocks, the thing reduced him to hesitation.  And the thing had weapons to shoot at him; his history, his very blood, stood open to its shafts; and the sole quality of a giant, which he could show to front it, was the breath of one for a mark.

These direct perceptions of the circumstances were played on by the fever he drew from his Fiesco bed.  Accuracy of vision in our crises is not so uncommon as the proportionate equality of feeling:  we do indeed. frequently see with eyes of just measurement while we are conducting ourselves like madmen.  The facts are seen, and yet the spinning nerves will change their complexion; and without enlarging or minimizing, they will alternate their effect on us immensely through the colour presenting them now sombre, now hopeful:  doing its work of extravagance upon perceptibly plain matter.  The fitful colour is the fever.  He must win her, for he never yet had failed—­he had lost her by his folly!  She was his—­she was torn from him!  She would come at his bidding—­she would cower to her tyrants!  The thought of her was life and death in his frame, bright heaven and the abyss.  At one beat of the heart she swam to his arms, at another he was straining over darkness.  And whose the fault?