That the Princess had done with him, done with him for ever, remained the most vivid impression that Hyacinth had carried away from Madeira Crescent the night before. He went home, and he flung himself on his narrow bed, where the consolation¹ of sleep again descended² upon him. But he woke up with the earliest dawn, and the beginning of a new day was a quick revival³ of pain. He was over-past, he had become vague, he was extinct. The things that Sholto had said to him came back to him, and the compassion⁴ of foreknowledge that Madame Grandoni had shown him from the first. Of Paul Muniment he only thought to wonder whether he knew. An insurmountable desire to do justice to him, for the very reason that there might be a temptation to oblique⁵ thoughts, forbade him to challenge his friend even in imagination. He vaguely⁶ wondered whether he would ever be superseded⁷; but this possibility faded away in a stronger light – a kind of dazzling vision of some great tribuneship, which swept before him now and again and in which the figure of the Princess herself seemed merged⁸ and extinguished. When full morning came at last, and he got up, it brought with it, in the restlessness which made it impossible to him to remain in his room, a return of that beginning of an answerless question, ‘After all – after all —?’ which the Princess had planted there the night before when she spoke⁹ so bravely in the name of the Revolution. ‘After all – after all, since nothing else was tried, or would, apparently¹⁰, ever be tried —’ He had a sense of his mind, which had been made up, falling to pieces again; but that sense in turn lost itself in a

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