“The captain’s there again.”

An icy spear seemed to pass through my heart.  I could make no reply.  The same moment a cold wind blew on me from the open door of the mill.

Although Lear was of course right when he said,

        “The tempest in my mind
    Doth from my senses take all feeling else
    Save what beats there,”

yet it is also true, that sometimes, in the midst of its greatest pain, the mind takes marvellous notice of the smallest things that happen around it.  This involves a law of which illustrations could be plentifully adduced from Shakespeare himself, namely, that the intellectual part of the mind can go on working with strange independence of the emotional.

From the door of the mill, as from a sepulchral tavern, blew a cold wind like the very breath of death upon me, just when that pang shot, in absolute pain, through my heart.  For a wind had arisen from behind the mill, and we were in its shelter save where a window behind and the door beside me allowed free passage to the first of the coming storm.

I believed I turned away from the old man without a word.  He made no attempt to detain me.  Whether he went back into his closet, the old mill, sacred in the eyes of the Father who honours His children, even as the church wherein many prayers went up to Him, or turned homewards to his cottage and his sleeping wife, I cannot tell.  The first I remember after that cold wind is, that I was fighting with that wind, gathered even to a storm, upon the common where I had dealt so severely with her who had this very night gone into that region into which, as into a waveless sea, all the rivers of life rush and are silent.  Is it the sea of death?  No.  The sea of life—­a life too keen, too refined, for our senses to know it, and therefore we call it death—­because we cannot lay hold upon it.

I will not dwell upon my thoughts as I wandered about over that waste.  The wind had risen to a storm charged with fierce showers of stinging hail, which gave a look of gray wrath to the invisible wind as it swept slanting by, and then danced and scudded along the levels.  The next point in that night of pain is when I found myself standing at the iron gate of Oldcastle Hall.  I had left the common, passed my own house and the church, crossed the river, walked through the village, and was restored to self-consciousness—­that is, I knew that I was there—­only when first I stood in the shelter of one of those great pillars and the monster on its top.  Finding the gate open, for they were not precise about having it fastened, I pushed it and entered.  The wind was roaring in the trees as I think I have never heard it roar since; for the hail clashed upon the bare branches and twigs, and mingled an unearthly hiss with the roar.  In the midst of it the house stood like a tomb, dark, silent, without one dim light to show that sleep and not death ruled within.  I could have fancied