As had happened once or twice before to him in his life, he fell at this crisis into a kind of waking-trance. That flood of tears became a river, swifter, deeper than the Lunt, and on its breast he was carried, so it seemed to him, into an imaginary landscape, far enough away from the corpse of Mr. Malakite and his ambiguous books! It was that same landscape which the Gainsborough picture had conjured up. But instead of a road there was this river; and the river carried him beyond the terraces and the gardens into less human scenery. There, between high, dark, slippery precipices was he carried, by the water of Christie’s weeping; and there he encountered in strange correspondency those same towering basaltic cliffs past which he had drifted in a similar hallucination nearly a year ago, as he waited for his mother’s train on the “Slopes” of Ramsgard!