But so momentous was the issue to my soul,
that the mere fact of having clearly marshalled the arguments on the
side of Hope made my reason critical and suspicious of their cogency.
From the sweet sophisms that my reason had called up, I turned, and
there stood Despair, ready for me behind a phalanx of arguments,
which laughed all Hope's 'ragged regiment' to scorn.
Had not my mother recognised her? Could the infallible perceptive
faculties of my mother be also deceived?
But to accept the fact that she who died on that mattress was little
Winnie of the sands was to go stark mad, and the very instinct of
self-preservation made me clutch at every sophism Hope could offer.
'Did not the woman declare that the singing-girl and the model were
_not_ one and the same?' said Hope. 'And if she did not lie, may you
not have been, after all, hunting a shadow through London?'
'It might not have been Winifred,' I shouted.
But no sooner had I done so than the scene in the
studio--Wilderspin's story of the model's terror on seeing my
mother's portrait--came upon me, and 'Dead! dead!' rang through me
like a funeral knell: all the superstructure of Hope's sophisms was
shattered in a moment like a house of cards: my imagination flew
away to all the London graveyards I had ever heard of; and there, in
the part divided by the pauper line, my soul hovered over a grave
newly made, and then dived down from coffin to coffin, one piled
above another, till it reached Winifred, lying pressed down by the
superincumbent mass; those eyes staring.
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