e? On the right was
a door. He went to it, opened it, and the hitherto muffled music burst
loud on his ear. He started back in dismal apprehension:--there was the
chapel, wide open to the eye of day!--clear and clean!--gone the
hideous bed! gone the damp and the dust! while the fresh air trembled
with the organ-breath rushing and rippling through it, and setting it
in sweetest turmoil! He had never had such a peculiar experience! He
had often doubted whether things were or were not projections from his
own brain; he moved and acted in a world of subdued fact and enhanced
fiction; he knew that sometimes he could not tell the one from the
other; but never had he had the apparently real and the actually unreal
brought so much face to face with each other! Everything was as clear
to his eyes as in their prime of vision, and yet there could be no
reality in what he saw!

Ever since he left the castle he had been greatly uncertain whether the
things that seemed to have taken place there, had really taken place.
He got himself in doubt about them the moment he failed to find the key
of the oak door. When he asked himself what then could have become of
his niece, he would reply that doubtless she was all right: she did not
want to marry Forgue, and had slipped out of the way: she had never
cared about the property! To have their own will was all women cared
about! Would his factor otherwise have dared such liberties with him,
the lady's guardian? He had not yet rendered his accounts, or yielded
his stewardship. When she died the property would be his! if she was
dead, it was his! She would never have dreamed of willing it away from
him! She did not know she could: how should she? girls never thought
about such things! Besides she would not have the heart: he had loved
her as his own flesh and blood!

At intervals, nevertheless, he was assailed, at times overwhelmed, by
the partial conviction that he had starved her to death in the chapel.
Then he was tormented as with all the furies of hell. In his night
visions he would see her lie wasting, hear her moaning, and crying in
vain for help: the hardest heart is yet at the mercy of a roused
imagination. He saw her body in its progressive stages of decay as the
weeks passed, and longed for the process to be over, that he might go
back, and pretending to have just found the lost room, carry it away,
and have it honourably buried! Should he take it for granted that it
had lain there