Mr. Pelly's mind felt referred to sudden death, but his reply was, "Guaranteed continuity of communication was what I meant." Then he reflected that perhaps sudden death might be only suspension of communication--however, he had had no experience of it himself, and could only guess. The picture continued sadly: "That makes me think how hard it is that you should wake to live in the great world I cannot join in; to move about and be free, while I must needs be speechless! Give me a thought sometimes, even as the disembodied spirit, as some hold, may give a thought to one he leaves behind. Yet even that one is better off than I; for may not he or she rejoin those that have gone before? While I must grow fainter and fainter, and be at last unseen and forgotten; or even worse, restored! Rather than that, let me peel and be relined, or sold at Christie's with several others as a job lot." Mr. Pelly endeavoured to console the speaker. "You need not be apprehensive," he said. "You are covered with glass, and in a warm and dry place. Nothing is more improbable than change, in any form, at Surley Stakes. Indeed, the first baronet, over two hundred and fifty years ago, is said to have accepted his new dignity with reluctance, on the score of its novelty. This library is three hundred years old." "And I," said the voice, "was over one hundred years old when it was built. But tell me--tell me--was it not all true, the story? You know it was!" "It rests on the intrinsic evidence of the manuscript. There is nothing to confirm it. And, as I have pointed out to you, your own narrative may be a mere figment of _my_ imagination--you must at least admit the possibility----" "I will if you insist upon it; it is of small importance to me what others think, so long as I may hang here undisturbed, and dream over the happy days I must have passed, in the person of my original, four hundred years ago. But oh, to think of that hateful time of bondage, with my darling hidden in the darkness underground, sore with manacles and starved for want of food! Think of my joy when I could see and feel his own dear face, all clammy though it was with the dungeon damps from below! Think of my exultation at his returning life--life to be lived for me! And believe me--for this I can know, for I _was_ Maddalena, and now it comes, like a dim memory--that I shuddered when they told me that the sodden old horror that had been my owner was well started on his flight to Hell, sent by the swift little knife-spike of my Marta. Oh how often have I seen that little knife itself in the long girth that could but just span the bloated carcass of the Ferretti!--for _he_ is a clear memory to me. And to think that that knife--_that knife_--was to..."