hain. The
sleeper started and woke. Her thoughts were usually now somewhat
scattered on waking, her look generally wandering. Half rising, as if
in terror, she exclaimed, "Don't take it from me, Robert! Don't! It is
my last comfort; let me keep it. I never tell any one whose hair it is;
I never show it."

Mrs. Pryor had already disappeared behind the curtain. Reclining far
back in a deep arm-chair by the bedside, she was withdrawn from view.
Caroline looked abroad into the chamber; she thought it empty. As her
stray ideas returned slowly, each folding its weak wings on the mind's
sad shore, like birds exhausted, beholding void, and perceiving silence
round her, she believed herself alone. Collected she was not yet;
perhaps healthy self-possession and self-control were to be hers no
more; perhaps that world the strong and prosperous live in had already
rolled from beneath her feet for ever. So, at least, it often seemed to
herself. In health she had never been accustomed to think aloud, but now
words escaped her lips unawares.

"Oh, I _should_ see him once more before all is over! Heaven _might_
favour me thus far!" she cried. "God grant me a little comfort before I
die!" was her humble petition.

"But he will not know I am ill till I am gone, and he will come when
they have laid me out, and I am senseless, cold, and stiff.

"What can my departed soul feel then? Can it see or know what happens to
the clay? Can spirits, through any medium, communicate with living
flesh? Can the dead at all revisit those they leave? Can they come in
the elements? Will wind, water, fire, lend me a path to Moore?

"Is it for nothing the wind sounds almost articulately sometimes--sings
as I have lately heard it sing at night--or passes the casement sobbing,
as if for sorrow to come? Does nothing, then, haunt it, nothing inspire
it?

"Why, it suggested to me words one night; it poured a strain which I
could have written down, only I was appalled, and dared not rise to seek
pencil and paper by the dim watch-light.

"What is that electricity they speak of, whose changes make us well or
ill, whose lack or excess blasts, whose even balance revives? What are
all those influences that are about us in the atmosphere, that keep
playing over our nerves like fingers on stringed instruments, and call
forth now a sweet note, and now a wail--now an exultant swell, and anon
the saddest cadence?

"_Where is_ the other world? In _what_ will another