'
Many a passer-by in the streets of London that night must have asked
himself, What lunatic is this at large? At one moment I would bound
along the pavement as though propelled by wings, scarcely seeming to
touch the pavement with my feet. At the next I would stop in a cold
perspiration and say to myself, 'Idiot, is it possible that you, so
learned in suffering--you, whom Destiny, or Heaven, or Hell, has
taken in hand as a special sport--can befool yourself with Hope now,
after the terrible comedy by which you and the ancestral idiots from
whom you sprang amused Queen Nin-ki-gal in Raxton crypt?'
Hope and Despair were playing at shuttlecock with my soul. Underneath
my misery there flickered a thought which, wild as it was, I dared
not dismiss--the thought that, after all, it _might_ not be Winifred
who had died in that den. Possible it was--however improbable--that I
_might_ be labouring under a delusion. My imagination _might_ have
exaggerated a resemblance into actual identity, and Winifred and she
whom Wilderspin painted might be two different persons--and there
might be hope even yet.
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