The huge room was never more than dimly lighted, and the far-off corners seemed more darkling than usual in the insufficient illumination of the far from brilliant lamps.  Mount Dunstan, after standing upon the hearth for a few minutes smoking a pipe, which would have compared ill with old Doby’s Sunday splendour, left his coffee cup upon the mantel and began to tramp up and down—­out of the dim light into the shadows, back out of the shadows into the poor light.

“You know,” he said, “what I think about most things—­you know what I feel.”

“I think I do.”

“You know what I feel about Englishmen who brand themselves as half men and marked merchandise by selling themselves and their houses and their blood to foreign women who can buy them.  You know how savage I have been at the mere thought of it.  And how I have sworn——­”

“Yes, I know what you have sworn,” said Mr. Penzance.

It struck him that Mount Dunstan shook and tossed his head rather like a bull about to charge an enemy.

“You know how I have felt myself perfectly within my rights when I blackguarded such men and sneered at such women—­taking it for granted that each was merchandise of his or her kind and beneath contempt.  I am not a foul-mouthed man, but I have used gross words and rough ones to describe them.”

“I have heard you.”

Mount Dunstan threw back his head with a big, harsh laugh.  He came out of the shadow and stood still.

“Well,” he said, “I am in love—­as much in love as any lunatic ever was—­with the daughter of Reuben S. Vanderpoel.  There you are—­and there I am!”

“It has seemed to me,” Penzance answered, “that it was almost inevitable.”

“My condition is such that it seems to me that it would be inevitable in the case of any man.  When I see another man look at her my blood races through my veins with an awful fear and a wicked heat.  That will show you the point I have reached.”  He walked over to the mantelpiece and laid his pipe down with a hand Penzance saw was unsteady.  “In turning over the pages of the volume of Life,” he said, “I have come upon the Book of Revelations.”

“That is true,” Penzance said.

“Until one has come upon it one is an inchoate fool,” Mount Dunstan went on.  “And afterwards one is—­for a time at least—­a sort of madman raving to one’s self, either in or out of a straitjacket—­as the case may be.  I am wearing the jacket—­worse luck!  Do you know anything of the state of a man who cannot utter the most ordinary words to a woman without being conscious that he is making mad love to her?  This afternoon I found myself telling Miss Vanderpoel the story of Red Godwyn and Alys of the Sea-Blue Eyes.  I did not make a single statement having any connection with myself, but throughout I was calling on her to think of herself and of me as of those two.  I saw her in my own arms, with the tears of Alys on her lashes.  I was making mad love, though she was unconscious of my doing it.”