Rochester was dead. It seemed to him that Rochester had never lived.
He left the Park and came along Knightsbridge still thinking of her sitting there waiting for him, his mind straying from that to the kiss, the dinner, the bowl of roses that stood between them—her voice.
Then all at once these considerations vanished, all at once, and like an extinguisher, fell on him that awful sensation of negation.
His mind pulled this way and that between contending forces, became a blank written across with letters of fire forming the question:
“Who am I?”
The acutest physical suffering could not have been worse than that torture of the over-taxed brain, that feeling that if he did not clutch at himself he would become nothing.
He ran for a few yards—then it passed and he found himself beneath a lamp-post recovering and muttering his own name rapidly to himself like a charm to exorcise evil.
“Jones—Jones—Jones.”
He looked around.
There were not many people to be seen, but a man and woman a few yards away were standing and looking at him. They had evidently stopped and turned to see what he was about and they went on when they saw him observing them.