It may seem foolish to record such mere froth of conversation, but I want my reader to understand how a part, at least, of the family of Moldwarp Hall regarded me. CHAPTER XL. A DREAM. My room looked dreary enough. There was no fire, and the loss of the patch of tapestry from the wall gave the whole an air of dilapidation. The wind howled fearfully in the chimney and about the door on the roof, and the rain came down on the leads like the distant trampling of many horses. But I was not in an imaginative mood. Charley was again my trouble. I could not bear him to be so miserable. Why was I not as miserable as he? I asked myself. Perhaps I ought to be, for although certainly I hoped more, I could not say I believed more than he. I wished more than ever that I did believe, for then I should be able to help him--I was sure of that; but I saw no possible way of arriving at belief. Where was the proof? Where even the hope of a growing probability? With these thoughts drifting about in my brain, like waifs which the tide will not let go, I was poring over the mutilated forms of the tapestry round the denuded door, with an expectation, almost a conviction, that I should find the fragment still hanging on the wall of the kitchen at the Moat, the very piece wanted to complete the broken figures. When I had them well fixed in my memory, I went to bed, and lay pondering over the several broken links which indicated some former connection between the Moat and the Hall, until I fell asleep, and began to dream strange wild dreams, of which the following was the last.