All was not well with Denis.  And the worst of it was, he had no clear notion of what was the matter.  He was changing.  The world was changing too.  It had suddenly expanded.  He felt that he, also, ought to expand.  There was so much to learn, to see, to know—­so much, that it seemed to paralyse his initiative.  Could he absorb all this?  Would he ever get things in order once more, and recapture his self-possession?  Would he ever again be satisfied with himself?  It was an invasion of his tranquillity, from within and without.  He was restless.  Bright ideas never came to him, as of old; or else they were the ideas of other people.  A miserable state of affairs!  He was becoming an automaton—­an echo.

An echo. . . .  How right Keith had been!

“It’s rotten,” he concluded.  “I’m a ludicrous figure, a pathetic idiot.”

The novel impressions of Florence had helped in the disintegration.  Nepenthe—­it’s sunshine, its relentless paganism—­had done the rest.  It shattered his earlier outlook and gave him nothing in exchange.  Nothing, and yet everything.  That vision of Angelina!  It filled his inner being with luxurious content; content and uncertainty.  It was there, at the back of every dream, of every intimate thought and every little worldly phrase that he uttered.  He was like a man who, looking long at the sun, sees its image floating in heaven, on earth—­wherever he casts his eye.  Angelina!  Nothing else was of any account.  How would it all end?  He drifted along in blissful apprehension of what the next day might bring.  She seemed to have become genuinely well-disposed towards him of late, though in rather a mocking, maternal sort of fashion.

The poetic vein had definitely run dry.  Impossible to make things rhyme, somehow.  Perhaps his passion was too strong for technical restraints.  He tried his hand at prose: 

“Your eyes bewilder me.  I would liken you to a shaft of sunlight, a withering flame—­a black flame, if such there be—­for your grace and ardour is even as a flame.  Your step is laughter and song.  Your hair is a torrent of starless night.  The sun is your lover, you god.  He takes joy in your perfection.  Your slender body palpitates with his imprisoned beams.  He has moulded your limbs and kissed your smooth skin in the days when you . . . nevermore will you whiten those kisses. . . .”

“It won’t do,” he sadly reflected, laying down the pen.  “The adaptation is too palpable.  Why does everybody anticipate my ideas?  The fact is, I have nothing to say.  I can only feel.  Everything went right, so long as I was in love with myself.  Now everything goes wrong.”

Then he remembered Keith’s pompous exhortation.

“Find yourself!  You know the Cave of Mercury!  Climb down, one night of full moon—­”

“There is something in what he says.  This very night I’ll go.”