Many a passer-by in the streets of London that night must have asked himself, What lunatic is this at large? At one moment I would bound along the pavement as though propelled by wings, scarcely seeming to touch the pavement with my feet. At the next I would stop in a cold perspiration and say to myself, 'Idiot, is it possible that you, so learned in suffering--you, whom Destiny, or Heaven, or Hell, has taken in hand as a special sport--can befool yourself with Hope now, after the terrible comedy by which you and the ancestral idiots from whom you sprang amused Queen Nin-ki-gal in Raxton crypt?' Hope and Despair were playing at shuttlecock with my soul. Underneath my misery there flickered a thought which, wild as it was, I dared not dismiss--the thought that, after all, it _might_ not be Winifred who had died in that den. Possible it was--however improbable--that I _might_ be labouring under a delusion. My imagination _might_ have exaggerated a resemblance into actual identity, and Winifred and she whom Wilderspin painted might be two different persons--and there might be hope even yet. But so momentous was the issue to my soul, that the mere fact of having clearly marshalled the arguments on the side of Hope made my reason critical and suspicious of their cogency. From the sweet sophisms that my reason had called up, I turned, and there stood Despair, ready for me behind a phalanx of arguments, which laughed all Hope's 'ragged regiment' to scorn. Had not my mother recognised her? Could the infallible perceptive faculties of my mother be also deceived? But to accept the fact that she who died on that mattress was little Winnie of the sands was to go stark mad, and the very instinct of self-preservation made me clutch at every sophism Hope could offer. 'Did not the woman declare that the singing-girl and the model were _not_ one and the same?' said Hope. 'And if she did not lie, may you not have been, after all, hunting a shadow through London?' 'It might not have been Winifred,' I shouted. But no sooner had I done so than the scene in the studio--Wilderspin's story of the model's terror on seeing my mother's portrait--came upon me, and 'Dead! dead!' rang through me like a funeral knell: all the superstructure of Hope's sophisms was shattered in a moment like a house of cards: my imagination flew away to all the London graveyards I had ever heard of; and there, in the part divided by the pauper line, my soul hovered over a grave newly made, and then dived down from coffin to coffin, one piled above another, till it reached Winifred, lying pressed down by the superincumbent mass; those eyes staring. Yes; that night I was mad!