“It is these black clothes,” said Strange. “I am like a leftover piece of the funeral, condemned to walk about the Town, frightening people into thinking of their own mortality.”

They were in the Bedford coffee-house in Covent-garden, chosen by Sir Walter as a place where they had often been very merry in the past and which might therefore do something to cheer Strange’s spirits. But on such an evening as this even the Bedford was somewhat deficient in cheerfulness. Outside, a cold black wind was pulling people this way and that, and driving a thick black rain into their eyes. Inside, rooms full of damp, unhappy gentlemen were producing a kind of gloomy, domesticated fog, which the waiters were attempting to dispel by putting extra shovelsful of coals on the fire and getting extra glassesful of hot spiced wine into the gentlemen.

When Sir Walter had come into the room he had discovered Strange writing furiously in a little book. He nodded towards the book and remarked, “You have not given up magic then?”

Strange laughed.

Sir Walter took this to mean he had not – which Sir Walter was glad of, for Sir Walter thought a great deal of a man’s having a profession and believed that useful, steady occupation might cure many things which other remedies could not. Only he did not quite like the laugh – a hard, bitter exclamation which he had never heard from Strange before. “It is just that you said …” he began.

“Oh, I said a great many things! All sorts of odd ideas crept into my brain. Excess of grief may bring on quite as fine a bout of madness as an excess of any thing else. Truth to tell, I was not quite myself for a time. Truth to tell, I was a little wild. But, as you see, that is all past now.”

But – truth to tell – Sir Walter did not see at all.

It was not quite enough to say that Strange had changed. In some senses he was just what he had always been. He smiled as often as before (though it was not quite the same smile). He spoke in the same ironic, superficial tone as he had always done (while giving the impression of scarcely attending to his own words). His words and his face were what all his friends remembered – with this difference: that the man behind them seemed only to be acting a part while his thoughts and his heart were somewhere else entirely. He looked out at them all from behind the sarcastic smile and none of them knew what he was thinking. He was more like a magician than ever before. It was very curious and no one knew what to make of it, but in some ways he was more like Norrell.

He wore a mourning ring on the fourth finger of his left hand with a thin strand of brown hair inside it and Sir Walter noticed that he continually touched it and turned it upon his finger.