“Are you ill, sir?” demanded Colin with much concern. Mr. Lupton only pressed the hand of the young man, as if glad once more to lay hold of flesh and blood, and then drew him close to his side, by way of reply. “I hope nothing has occurred?” again observed Colin. “But you are ill,--I see you are.” “No!”--at length stammered his father tremulously, “but--my boy--I--I--_have seen her!_” And at the recollection of what he had seen, or fancied he had seen, he shook violently, as though every nerve in his body was shattered. “Seen who, sir?” exclaimed Colin, though turning pale with the instant flash of consciousness that he _knew who_, as well as he that sat there unmanned and trembling. “She has been back to me, true enough,” said he again; and shaking his head just as might a man upon whom the awful doubt of an after-life has just been made a woful certainty,--a plain and demonstrative certainty,--by the vision of an immateriality far more positive in itself, than the plainest of those whom Shelley has so finely described as “The ghastly people of the realm of dream.” “Never heed it now, sir,” rejoined the young man; “endeavour to calm yourself, and try to forget it.” “Forget it!” repeated Mr. Lupton incredulously: “never,--never!--Oh no,--no!” And as he spoke with more energy, and raised his voice in a pathetic manner as addressing some being unseen, he continued,--“Oh, my wife, my wife!--I am indeed wretched, very wretched!” Again Colin endeavoured to persuade him out of this painful fear; but it was not until a considerable time had elapsed in these efforts that he even partially succeeded. Having, however, at length done so, he sat down beside his father and remained with him, engaged in serious conversation until daylight on the following morning. During that discourse it is believed Mr. Lupton informed his son of every particular touching the sight or the imagination which had thus affected him; but farther than that they were never made known. Mr. Lupton himself, during the whole remainder of his life, was never known upon any occasion even to allude to such a circumstance as having ever even happened; and no one ever ventured to speak of it before him. While Colin himself, who on various occasions was questioned by his friends as to the nature of the occurrences on that mysterious night, invariably returned this answer, “that if any supernatural revelation had been made to his father, to him alone it belonged to reveal it if he would: but as for himself, he could not have anything to do with the especial secrets and the bosom business of another individual.” This latter sentiment, however praiseworthy, I very strongly suspect to be but a variation of one which he had often heard, and had picked up in the learned school of Mr. Peter Veriquear.