Soon, these thoughts began to take a form that I could recognise.

In the clinging heat and fierce seething fever, to which neither waking nor sleeping brought a breath of freshness or a dream of change, I began to act my part over again, in the events that had passed, but in a strangely altered character.  Now, instead of placing implicit trust in others, as I had done; instead of failing to discover a significance and a warning in each circumstance as it arose, I was suspicious from the first—­suspicious of Margaret, of her father, of her mother, of Mannion, of the very servants in the house.  In the hideous phantasmagoria of my own calamity on which I now looked, my position was reversed.  Every event of the doomed year of my probation was revived.  But the doom itself, the night-scene of horror through which I had passed, had utterly vanished from my memory.  This lost recollection, it was the one unending toil of my wandering mind to recover, and I never got it back.  None who have not suffered as I suffered then, can imagine with what a burning rage of determination I followed past events in my delirium, one by one, for days and nights together,—­followed, to get to the end which I knew was beyond, but which I never could see, not even by glimpses, for a moment at a time.

However my visions might alter in their course of succession, they always began with the night when Mannion returned from the continent to North Villa.  I stood again in the drawing-room; I saw him enter; I marked the slight confusion of Margaret; and instantly doubted her.  I noticed his unwillingness to meet her eye or mine; I looked on the sinister stillness of his face; and suspected him.  From that moment, love vanished, and hatred came in its place.  I began to watch; to garner up slight circumstances which confirmed my suspicions; to wait craftily for the day when I should discover, judge, and punish them both—­the day of disclosure and retribution that never came.

Sometimes, I was again with Mannion, in his house, on the night of the storm.  I detected in every word he spoke an artful lure to trap me into trusting him as my second father, more than as my friend.  I heard in the tempest sounds which mysteriously interrupted, or mingled with, my answers, voices supernaturally warning me of my enemy, each time that I spoke to him.  I saw once more the hideous smile of triumph on his face, as I took leave of him on the doorstep:  and saw it, this time, not as an illusion produced by a flash of lightning, but as a frightful reality which the lightning disclosed.

Sometimes, I was again in the garden at North Villa accidentally overhearing the conversation between Margaret and her mother—­overhearing what deceit she was willing to commit, for the sake of getting a new dress—­then going into the room, and seeing her assume her usual manner on meeting me, as if no such words as I had listened to but the moment before, had ever proceeded from her lips.