Then I recalled that I had met with the phrase in newspapers. The fact that missing persons were so numerous that a bureau of the metropolitan police was required to handle them cheered me more than any other single fact. It was consoling to feel that even, in my peculiar misery I had joined a great multitude who suffered the loss of loved ones, even as in toil and labor and poverty I had merged into the vast majority. When Dibdin left me I learned that I might adopt Alicia without any great obstacles, if she were willing, but I was no wiser as to her whereabouts. The Home, in the person of the Matron, inquired how "she was getting along." She was obviously not there, and I experienced a misery of guilt as though I had robbed the world of its dearest possession and then lost it. Alone and bereft I sat, sinking to a mere pin’s point in my abasement. I had begun to believe myself schooled in life, something of a man among men. But my own ineffectiveness was now dismally revealed to me. I had proved myself incapable of guarding even what was dearest to me in the world. I was at the bottom of an abyss from which I now felt hopeless to scramble upward. The sheer and beetling walls of granite were overpoweringly steep and forbidding. For the first time in long years, I believe I mentally prayed. I waited for Dibdin. And then suddenly, as is the way with me when I am at the bottom, my spirits bounded upward. Alicia would come back to me, I felt in a sudden surge of assurance. At that moment I felt sure that she was thinking of me, that she was yearning to return. And before I knew it, I was blocking in magnificent plans for her education, for making a splendid woman of her, even though she already seemed perfect, of supplementing nature’s handiwork with all the force that was in me. I saw her resplendent, a shining creature, the woman of my dreams! What a florid designer is hope! But why should she have been taken from me so abruptly? The vast mystery of life encompassed me again like a shell, impenetrable—a carapace through which nature must supply the openings—and she had evidently not supplied them. Would Dibdin never come with his policeman? Books, for so long my mainstay and support, were now useless to me. I turned over many volumes idly but my mind no longer reacted to that old and magical alchemy. The volume of Epictetus that Dibdin had fingered might have been a seed catalogue, so remote it seemed and so null. I was now a ghost among my books: I was plunged in "The Woods of Westermain," and my memory flung me the lines: