some one have removed the manuscript. I looked round. The windows were
closed, the curtains partly drawn over the shutters, as they were before
my consciousness had left me: all seemed undisturbed. Snatching up one of
the candles, fast dying out, I went into the adjoining library, the
desolate state-rooins, into the entrance-hall, and examined the outer
door. barred and locked! The robber had left no vestige of his stealthy
presence.

I resolved to go at once to Strahan's room and tell him of the loss
sustained. A deposit had been confided to me, and I felt as if there
were a slur on my honour every moment in which I kept its abstraction
concealed from him to whom I was responsible for the trust. I hastily
ascended the great staircase, grim with faded portraits, and found myself
in a long corridor opening on my own bedroom; no doubt also on Strahan's.
Which was his? I knew not. I opened rapidly door after door, peered into
empty chambers, went blundering on, when to the right, down a narrow
passage. I recognized the signs of my host's whereabouts,--signs
familiarly commonplace and vulgar; signs by which the inmate of any
chamber in lodging-house or inn makes himself known,--a chair before a
doorway, clothes negligently thrown on it, beside it a pair of shoes. And
so ludicrous did such testimony of common every-day life, of the habits
which Strahan would necessarily have contracted in his desultory
unluxurious bachelor's existence,--so ludicrous, I say, did these homely
details seem to me, so grotesquely at variance with the wonders of which I
had been reading, with the wonders yet more incredible of which I myself
had been witness and victim, that as I turned down the passage, I heard my
own unconscious half-hysterical laugh; and, startled by the sound of that
laugh as if it came from some one else, I paused, my hand on the door, and
asked myself: "Do I dream? Am I awake? And if awake what am I to say to
the common place mortal I am about to rouse? Speak to him of a phantom!