the heavy silence of the grave. Moving by me in the nameless
inner light, which no eye saw but mine, the dead procession of
immaterial scenes and beings unrolled its silent length. I saw
once more the pleading face of a friend of early days, with the
haunting vision that had tortured him through life by his side
again--with the long-forgotten despair in his eyes which had once
touched my heart, and bound me to him, till I had tracked his
destiny through its darkest windings to the end. I saw the figure
of an innocent woman passing to and fro in an ancient country
house, with the shadow of a strange suspicion stealing after her
wherever she went. I saw a man worn by hardship and old age,
stretched dreaming on the straw of a stable, and muttering in his
dream the terrible secret of his life.

Other scenes and persons followed these, less vivid in their
revival, but still always recognizable and distinct; a young girl
alone by night, and in peril of her life, in a cottage on a
dreary moor--an upper chamber of an inn, with two beds in it; the
curtains of one bed closed, and a man standing by them, waiting,
yet dreading to draw them back--a husband secretly following the
first traces of a mystery which his wife's anxious love had
fatally hidden from him since the day when they first met; these,
and other visions like them, shadowy reflections of the living
beings and the real events that had been once, peopled the
solitude and the emptiness around me. They haunted me still when
I tried to break the chain of thought which my own efforts had
wound about my mind; they followed me to and fro in the room; and
they came out with me when I left it. I had lifted the veil from
the Past for myself, and I was now to rest no more till I had
lifted it for others.