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 perce