me back. My heart did not fail at all
in this conflict; I only wished that I had wings and could ascend the
gale, spread and repose my pinions on its strength, career in its
course, sweep where it swept. While wishing this, I suddenly felt
colder where before I was cold, and more powerless where before I was
weak. I tried to reach the porch of a great building near, but the mass
of frontage and the giant spire turned black and vanished from my eyes.
Instead of sinking on the steps as I intended, I seemed to pitch
headlong down an abyss. I remember no more.

CHAPTER XVI.

AULD LANG SYNE.

Where my soul went during that swoon I cannot tell. Whatever she saw,
or wherever she travelled in her trance on that strange night she kept
her own secret; never whispering a word to Memory, and baffling
imagination by an indissoluble silence. She may have gone upward, and
come in sight of her eternal home, hoping for leave to rest now, and
deeming that her painful union with matter was at last dissolved. While
she so deemed, an angel may have warned her away from heaven's
threshold, and, guiding her weeping down, have bound her, once more,
all shuddering and unwilling, to that poor frame, cold and wasted, of
whose companionship she was grown more than weary.

I know she re-entered her prison with pain, with reluctance, with a
moan and a long shiver. The divorced mates, Spirit and Substance, were
hard to re-unite: they greeted each other, not in an embrace, but a
racking sort of struggle. The returning sense of sight came upon me,
red, as if it swam in blood; suspended hearing rushed back loud, like
thunder; consciousness revived in fear: I sat up appalled, wondering
into what region, amongst what strange beings I was waking. At first I
knew nothing I looked on: a wall was not a wall--a lamp not a lamp. I
should have understood what we call a ghost, as well as I did the
commonest object: which is another way of intimating that all my eye
rested on struck it as spectral. But the faculties soon settled each in
his place; the life-machine presently resumed its wonted and regular
working.

Still, I knew not where I was; only in time I saw I had been removed
from the spot where I fell: I lay on no portico-step; night and tempest
were excluded by walls, windows, and ceiling. Into some house I had
been carried--but what house?

I could only think of the pensionnat in the Rue Fossette. Still
half-dreaming, I tried hard to disc