I sat and brooded over the Past, till I fell asleep in the phantom-peopled night. And all the night long they were about me--the men and women of the long past. And I was one of them. I wandered in my dreams over the whole house, habited in a long old-fashioned gown, searching for one who was Alice, and yet would be some one else. From room to room I wandered till weary, and could not find her. At last, I gave up the search, and, retreating to the library, shut myself in. There, taking down from the shelf the volume of Von Salis, I tried hard to go on with the translation of _Pysche’s Sorrow_, from the point where the student had left it, thinking it, all the time, my own unfinished work. When I woke in the morning, the chamber of ghosts, in which I had fallen asleep, had vanished. The sun shone in through the windows of the library; and on its dusty table lay Von Salis, open at _Pysche’s Trauer_. The sheet of paper with the translation on it, was not there. I hastened to leave the house, and effected my escape before the servants were astir. Sometimes I condensed my whole being into a single intensity of will--that she should come to me; and sustained it, until I fainted with the effort. She did not come. I desisted altogether at last, for I bethought me that, whether dead or alive, it must cause her torture not to be able to obey it. Sometimes I questioned my own sanity. But the thought of the loss of my reason did not in itself trouble me much. What tortured me almost to the madness it supposed was the possible fact, which a return to my right mind might reveal--that there never had been a Lady Alice. What if I died, and awoke from my madness, and found a clear blue air of life, a joyous world of sunshine, a divine wealth of delight around and in me--but no Lady Alice--she having vanished with all the other phantoms of a sick brain! “Rather let me be mad still,” I said, “if mad I am; and so dream on that I have been blessed. Were I to wake to such a heaven, I would pray God to let me go and live the life I had but dreamed, with all its sorrows, and all its despair, and all its madness, that when I died again, I might know that such things had been, and could never be awaked from, and left behind with the dream.” But I was not mad, any more than Hamlet; though, like him, despair sometimes led me far along the way at the end of which madness lies. CHAPTER XVII _The Physician._ I was now Captain Campbell, of the Scotch Greys, contriving to live on my half pay, and thinking far more about the past than the present or the future. My father was dead. My only brother was also gone, and the property had passed into other hands. I had no fixed place of abode, but went from one spot to another, as the whim seized me--sometimes remaining months, sometimes removing next day, but generally choosing retired villages about which I knew nothing.