"But yet," said Lillyston, "if you come to analyse this, it resolves itself into nothing. You were confessedly agitated, and almost hysterical that night; your body was unstrung; you were wet through, and it was doubtless the sudden passage from the darkness outside to the dim and uncertain glimmer of your own room, which acted so powerfully on your excited imagination, as to project your inward thoughts into a shape which you mistook for an external appearance. I remember noticing the aspect of your rooms myself that evening; the mysterious shadows, and the mingled effects of dull red firelight with black objects, together with the rustle of the red curtain in front of your window which you had left open, and the weird waving of your black gown in the draught, made such an impression even on me merely in consequence of the alarm your shriek had excited, that I could have fancied _anything_ myself, if I wasn't pretty strong-headed, and rather prosaic. As it was, I did half fancy an unknown Presence in the room." "Yes, but you say _inward_ thoughts," replied Hazlet eagerly. "Now these _weren't_ my inward thoughts; on the contrary they flashed on me like a revelation, and the strange word, `And,' (for I read distinctly, `_And_ this is--') was to me like an awful copula connecting time and eternity for ever. I had always thought of quite another, quite a different hell; but this showed me for the first time that the state of sinfulness is _the_ hell of sin. It was only the other day that I came across those lines of Milton--oh, how true they are-- "Which way I fly is hell, _myself am hell_, And in the lowest deep a lower deep Still gaping to devour me opens wide, To which the hell I suffer seems a heaven." "It was the truth conveyed in those lines which I then first discovered, and discovered, it seems to me, from without. I know very very little-- I am shamefully ignorant, but I do think that the vision of that night taught me more than a thousand volumes of scholastic theology. And let me say too," he continued humbly, "that by it I was plucked like a brand from the burning; by it my conversion was brought about." None of the others were in a mood to criticise the phraseology of Hazlet's religious convictions, and he clearly desired that the subject of his own immediate experiences, as being one full of awfulness for him, might be dropped.