The corridor was very dim, and full of gusty flaws. It was night, and the rain beat upon the windows. Without, it was all a chaos of cavernous glooms and myriad-drawn threads of water, weaving cloud to earth in one inextricable bondage. The darkness lay upon the King’s heart like a tombstone. He cried to One in his agony to lift it, and bid the dead arise and come forth. He seemed to feel the cerements about his limbs, the headcloth binding and stupefying his brain. He talked incessantly to himself--prayers, expostulations, even blasphemies--though he did not know it. A fearful thought was haunting him persistently--the thought that his reason was once more succumbing to the illness which had seized and overwhelmed it in the fifth year of his reign. He gasped and shivered in the stress of that apprehension. Providence had then thought fit to restore him, after a few terrible weeks of possession; would not a renewed attack signify his proved unworthiness of Its favours, and his abandonment by It to the powers of darkness, this time for all eternity? He uttered a sudden cry, and, sinking into a chair, covered his face with his hands. The storm screamed above him, dashing its torrents on the glass. Only that fragile glaze stood between him and the besieging horrors. In a minute, in a moment, they must be through, and he would be claimed by them and damned for evermore. He fought kingly to rally his nerves. A crown! A monstrous destiny! Yes, but its divine virtues engendered like qualities in those meet and resolute to assume them. He had striven, he would strive, to honour, according to his lights, the trust reposed in him. The will was his, if the lights were Heaven’s. God might decree him a fool; He should never call him a coward. He rose to his feet once more and looked pallidly from the window. The sky was full of countless faces, and all gibing and distorted. There was not one among them but was known to him, or had been, though he could not recall when or how. Statesmen, warriors, servants, kith and kin--torn this way and that, they mingled, a multitudinous galaxy of spectres, with the darkness, and hemmed him in, a wall of mowing visages. To stand thus and gaze upon the throng was to drink the very utterness of despair. Had none a gentle look for him? Were all kings doomed so to realise their loneliness in the vast of time? No mercy for him; no hope, no love. How was it possible to love one so singly exalted, so isolated from all contact with the dear common human emotions? Was it not appalling to be a king! Sudden through the dark, through the twisted faces, a light twinkled. He started, he stared, he drew a deep ecstatic breath. He thought he heard a voice saying “Arise, and come forth!” and he shook the bandage from his head and stood erect. The light! O God, not one, but infinite! Like daisies opening upon a hill, they climbed that wall of darkness and spread from town to sky. And in their blossoming the faces were gone.