As we left the room I turned round to look at it. The picture of the mattress, now nearly hidden in the shadows--the picture of the other furniture in the room--two chairs--or rather one and a part of a chair, for the rails of the hack were gone--a table, a large brown jug, the handle of which had been replaced by a piece of string, and a white washhand-basin, with most of the rim broken away, and a shallow tub apparently used for a bath--seemed to sink into my flesh as though bitten in by the etcher's aquafortis. Winifred's sleeping-room! 'Of course she wasn't her daughter,' said Wilderspin meditatively, as we stood on the stairs. 'Not my darter! Why, in course she was. What an imperent thing to say, sure_lie_!' 'There is one thing I wish to say to you,' said he to the woman. 'When I agreed with you as to the sum to be paid for the model's sittings, it was clearly understood that she was to sit to no other artist, and that the match-selling was to cease. 'Well, and 'ave I broke my word?' 'A person has heard her singing and seen her selling baskets,' I said. 'The person tells a lie,' said the woman, with a dogged and sullen look, and in a voice that grew thicker with every word. 'Ain't there sich things as doubles?' At these last words my heart gave a sudden leap. We left the house, and neither of us spoke till we got into the Strand. 'Did you see the--body at all?' I asked Wilderspin. 'Oh, yes. After I gave her the money for the funeral I went to Primrose Court. The woman took me upstairs, and there on the mattress lay--what the poor woman believed to be the earthly body of an earthly daughter. It was covered with a quilt. Over the face a ragged shawl had been thrown.' 'Yes, yes. She raised the shawl?' 'Yes, the woman went and held the candle over the head of the mattress and uncovered the face; and there lay she whom the woman believed to be her daughter, and whom you believe to be the young lady you seek, but whom I _know_ to be a spiritual body--the perfect type that was sent to me in order that I might fulfil my mission. You groan, Mr. Aylwin, but remember that you have lost only a dream, a beautiful hallucination; I have lost a reality: there is nothing real but the spiritual world. III As I wandered about the streets after parting from Wilderspin, what were my emotions? If I could put them into words, is there one human being in ten thousand who would understand me? Happily, no. For there is not one in ten thousand who, having sounded the darkest depths of human misery, will know how strong is Hope when at the true death-struggle with Despair. 'Hope in the human breast,' wrote my father, 'is a passion, a wild, a lawless, and an indomitable passion, that almost no cruelty of Fate can conquer.'