When he left me, I sat in a cold stupor, in which the thoughts--if thoughts they could be called--came and went of themselves. Overcome by the appearances of things--as what man the strongest may not sometimes be?--I felt as if I had lost her utterly, as if there was no Lady Alice anywhere, and as if, to add to the vacant horror of the world without her, a shadow of her, a goblin _simulacrum_, soul-less, unreal, yet awfully like her, went wandering about the place which had once been glorified by her presence--as to the eyes of seers the phantoms of events which have happened years before are still visible, clinging to the room in which they have indeed _taken place_. But, in a little while, something warm began to throb and flow in my being; and I thought that if she were dead, I should love her still; that now she was not worse than dead; it was only that her soul was out of sight. Who could tell but it might be wandering in worlds of too noble shapes and too high a speech, to permit of representation in the language of the world in which her bodily presentation remained, and therefore her speech and behaviour seemed to men to be mad? Nay, was it not in some sense better for me that it should be so? To see once the pictured likeness of her of whom I had no such memorial, would I not give years of my poverty-stricken life? And here was such a statue of her, as that of his wife which the widowed king was bending before, when he said:-- “What fine chisel Could ever yet cut breath?” This statue I might see, “looking like an angel,” as the gardener had said. And, while the bond of visibility remained, must not the soul be, somehow, nearer to the earth, than if the form lay decaying beneath it? Was there not some possibility that the love for whose sake the reason had departed, might be able to recall that reason once more to the windows of sense,--make it look forth at those eyes, and lie listening in the recesses of those ears? In her somnambulic sleeps, the present body was the sign that the soul was within reach: so it might be still. Mrs. Blakesley was still at the lodge, then: I would call upon her to-morrow. I went to bed, and dreamed all night that Alice was sitting somewhere in a land “full of dark mountains,” and that I was wandering about in the darkness, alternately calling and listening; sometimes fancying I heard a faint reply, which might be her voice or an echo of my own; but never finding her. I woke in an outburst of despairing tears, and my despair was not comforted by my waking. CHAPTER XXII _The Sleeper._ It was a lovely morning in autumn. I walked to the Hall. I entered at the same gate by which I had entered first, so many years before. But it was not Mrs. Blakesley that opened it. I inquired after her, and the woman told me that she lived at the Hall now, and took care of Lady Alice. So far, this was hopeful news.