Later, when he looked back upon these winter months, Piers could distinguish nothing clearly.  It was a time of confused and obscure motives, of oscillation, of dreary conflict, of dull suffering.  His correspondence with Olga, his meetings with her, had no issue.  He made a thousand resolves; a thousand times he lost them.  But for the day’s work, which kept him in an even tenor for a certain number of hours, he must have drifted far and perilously.

It was a life of solitude.  The people with whom he talked were mere ghosts, intangible, not of his world.  Sometimes, amid a crowd of human beings, he was stricken voiceless and motionless:  he stared about him, and was bewildered, asking himself what it all meant.

His health was not good; he suffered much from headaches; he fell into languors, lassitude of body and soul.  As a result, imagination seemed to be dead in him.  The torments of desire were forgotten.  When he beard that Irene Derwent had returned to London, the news affected him only with a sort of weary curiosity.  Was it true that she would not marry Arnold Jacks?  It seemed so.  He puzzled over the story, wondered about it; but only his mind was concerned, never his emotions.

Once he was summoned to Queen’s Gate.  John Jacks lay on a sofa, in his bedroom; he talked as usual, but in a weaker voice, and had the face of a man doomed.  Piers saw no one else in the house, and on going away felt that he had been under that roof for the last time.

His mind was oppressed with the thought of death.  As happens, probably, to every imaginative man at one time or another, he had a conviction that his own days were drawing to a premature close.  Speculation about the future seemed idle; he had come to the end of hopes and fears.  Night after night his broken sleep suffered the same dream; he saw Mrs. Hannaford, who stretched her hands to him, and with a face of silent woe seemed to implore his help.  Help against Death; and his powerlessness wrung his heart with anguish.  Waking, he thought of all the women—­beautiful, tender, objects of infinite passion and worship—­who even at that moment lay smitten by the great destroyer; the gentle, the loving, racked, disfigured, flung into the horror of the grave.  And his being rose in revolt; he strove in silent agony against the dark ruling of the world.

One day there was of tranquil self-possession, of blessed calm.  A Sunday in January, when, he knew not how, he found himself amid the Sussex lanes, where he had rambled in the time of harvest.  The weather, calm and dry and mild, but without sunshine, soothed his spirit.  He walked for hours, and towards nightfall stood upon a wooded hill, gazing westward.  An overcast, yet not a gloomy sky; still, soft-dappled; with rifts and shimmerings of pearly blue scattered among multitudinous billows, which here were a dusky yellow, there a deep neutral tint.  In the low west, beneath the long dark edge, a soft splendour, figured with airy cloudlets, waited for the invisible descending sun.  Moment after moment the rifts grew longer, the tones grew warmer; above began to spread a rosy flush; in front, the glory brightened, touching the cloud-line above it with a tender crimson.