‘Yes, yes.  She raised the shawl?’

’Yes, the woman went and held the candle over the head of the mattress and uncovered the face; and there lay she whom the woman believed to be her daughter, and whom you believe to be the young lady you seek, but whom I know to be a spiritual body—­the perfect type that was sent to me in order that I might fulfil my mission.  You groan, Mr. Aylwin, but remember that you have lost only a dream, a beautiful hallucination; I have lost a reality:  there is nothing real but the spiritual world.

III

As I wandered about the streets after parting from Wilderspin, what were my emotions?  If I could put them into words, is there one human being in ten thousand who would understand me?  Happily, no.  For there is not one in ten thousand who, having sounded the darkest depths of human misery, will know how strong is Hope when at the true death-struggle with Despair.  ‘Hope in the human breast,’ wrote my father, ’is a passion, a wild, a lawless, and an indomitable passion, that almost no cruelty of Fate can conquer.’

Many a passer-by in the streets of London that night must have asked himself, What lunatic is this at large?  At one moment I would bound along the pavement as though propelled by wings, scarcely seeming to touch the pavement with my feet.  At the next I would stop in a cold perspiration and say to myself, ’Idiot, is it possible that you, so learned in suffering—­you, whom Destiny, or Heaven, or Hell, has taken in hand as a special sport—­can befool yourself with Hope now, after the terrible comedy by which you and the ancestral idiots from whom you sprang amused Queen Nin-ki-gal in Raxton crypt?’

Hope and Despair were playing at shuttlecock with my soul.  Underneath my misery there flickered a thought which, wild as it was, I dared not dismiss—­the thought that, after all, it might not be Winifred who had died in that den.  Possible it was—­however improbable—­that I might be labouring under a delusion.  My imagination might have exaggerated a resemblance into actual identity, and Winifred and she whom Wilderspin painted might be two different persons—­and there might be hope even yet.  But so momentous was the issue to my soul, that the mere fact of having clearly marshalled the arguments on the side of Hope made my reason critical and suspicious of their cogency.  From the sweet sophisms that my reason had called up, I turned, and there stood Despair, ready for me behind a phalanx of arguments, which laughed all Hope’s ‘ragged regiment’ to scorn.

Had not my mother recognised her?  Could the infallible perceptive faculties of my mother be also deceived?

But to accept the fact that she who died on that mattress was little Winnie of the sands was to go stark mad, and the very instinct of self-preservation made me clutch at every sophism Hope could offer.