Page:Vivian Grey, Volume 2.djvu/241

Six weeks, unconsciously to Vivian, had elapsed since the fatal day and he was now recovering from the effects of a fever, from which, his medical attendants had supposed he never could have escaped. And what had been the past? It did, indeed, seem like a hot and feverish dream. Here was he, once more in his own quiet room, watched over by his beloved parents; and had there then ever existed such beings as the Marquess, and Mrs. Lorraine, and Cleveland, or were they only the actors in a vision? "It must be so," thought Vivian; and he jumped up in his bed, and stared wildly around him. "And yet it was a horrid dream! Murder! horrible murder!—and so real! so palpable!—I muse upon their voices, as upon familiar sounds, and I recal all the events, not as the shadowy incidents of sleep—that mysterious existence, in which the experience of a century seems caught in the breathing of a second—but as the natural, and ma-