dreaming on the straw of a
stable, and muttering in his dream the terrible secret of his life.

Other scenes and persons followed these, less vivid in their revival,
but still always recognizable and distinct; a young girl alone by
night, and in peril of her life, in a cottage on a dreary moor--an upper
chamber of an inn, with two beds in it; the curtains of one bed closed,
and a man standing by them, waiting, yet dreading to draw them back--a
husband secretly following the first traces of a mystery which his
wife's anxious love had fatally hidden from him since the day when they
first met; these, and other visions like them, shadowy reflections of
the living beings and the real events that had been once, peopled the
solitude and the emptiness around me. They haunted me still when I tried
to break the chain of thought which my own efforts had wound about my
mind; they followed me to and fro in the room; and they came out with
me when I left it. I had lifted the veil from the Past for myself, and I
was now to rest no more till I had lifted it for others.

I went at once to my eldest brother and showed him my son's letter, and
told him all that I have written here. His kind heart was touched as
mine had been. He felt for my suspense; he shared my anxiety; he laid
aside his own occupation on the spot.

"Only tell me," he said, "how I can help, and I will give every h our in
the day to you and to George."

I had come to him with my mind almost as full of his past life as of
my own; I recalled to his memory events in his experience as a working
clergyman in London; I set him looking among papers which he had
preserved for half his lifetime, and the very existence of which he had
forgotten long since; I recalled to him the names of persons to whose
necessities he had ministered in his sacred office, and whose stories he
had heard from their own lips or received under their own handwriting.
When we parted he was certain of what he was wanted to do, and was
resolute on that very day to begin the work.

I went to Morgan next, and appealed to him as I had already appealed
to Owen. It was only part of his odd character to start all sorts of
eccentric objections in reply; to affect a cynical indifference, which
he was far from really and truly feeling; and to indulge in plenty of
quaint sarcasm on the subject of Jessie and his nephew George. I waited
till these little surface-ebullitions had all expended themselves, and
then