Could I not still be loyal in heart and mind to Fanny, even though now I knew how little she cared whether I was loyal or not? I even climbed up behind Mr Crimble's thick spectacles and looked down again at myself from that point of vantage. Whether or not I was his affair, I could try to make him mine—perhaps even persuade Fanny to love him.
Oh, dear; was not every singing bird in that wilderness, every unfolding flower and sunlit March leaf welcoming the spirit within me to their quiet habitation? As if in response to this naïve thought, welled up in my memory the two last stanzas of my Tom o' Bedlam, which, either for pride or shame, had stuck in my throat on the skin mat in Lady Pollacke's sky-lit drawing-room:——
"With a heart of furious fancies,
Whereof I am commander:
With a burning spear,
And a horse of air,
To the wilderness I wander.
With a knight of ghosts and shadows,
I summoned am to tourney:
Ten leagues beyond