o went to sleep.

* * * * *

For some nights after, I watched among the ruins, spending all the dark
hours up to midnight patrolling about the bit of wall which was
associated with so many emotions; but I heard nothing, and saw nothing
beyond the quiet course of nature; nor, so far as I am aware, has
anything been heard again. Dr. Moncrieff gave me the history of the
youth, whom he never hesitated to name. I did not ask, as Simson did, how
he recognized him. He had been a prodigal,--weak, foolish, easily imposed
upon, and "led away," as people say. All that we had heard had passed
actually in life, the Doctor said. The young man had come home thus a day
or two after his mother died,--who was no more than the housekeeper in
the old house,--and distracted with the news, had thrown himself down at
the door and called upon her to let him in. The old man could scarcely
speak of it for tears. To me it seemed as if--Heaven help us, how little
do we know about anything!--a scene like that might impress itself
somehow upon the hidden heart of nature. I do not pretend to know how,
but the repetition had struck me at the time as, in its terrible
strangeness and incomprehensibility, almost mechanical,--as if the unseen
actor could not exceed or vary, but was bound to re-enact the whole. One
thing that struck me, however, greatly, was the likeness between the old
minister and my boy in the manner of regarding these strange phenomena.
Dr. Moncrieff was not terrified, as I had been myself, and all the rest
of us. It was no "ghost," as I fear we all vulgarly considered it, to
him,--but a poor creature whom he knew under these conditions, just as
he had known him in the flesh, having no doubt of his identity. And to
Roland it was the same. This spirit in pain,--if it was a spirit,--this
voice out of the unseen,--was a poor fellow-creature in misery, to be
succored and helped out of his trouble, to my boy. He spoke to me quite
frankly about it when he got better. "I knew father would find out some
way," he said. And this was when he was strong and well, and all idea
that he would turn hysterical or become a seer of visions had happily
passed away.

* * * * *

I must add one curious fact, which does not seem to me to have any
relation to the above, but which Simson made great use of, as the human
agency which he was determined to find somehow. We had examined the ruins
very