perplexing to him who would get at the truth, as the
marvels he recounts are to the bewildered reason of Fenwick the Sceptic?

CHAPTER XL.

The dead man's manuscript was gone. But how? A phantom might delude my
eye, a human will, though exerted at a distance, might, if the tales
of mesmerism be true, deprive me of movement and of consciousness; but
neither phantom nor mesmeric will could surely remove from the table
before me the material substance of the book that had vanished! Was I to
seek explanation in the arts of sorcery ascribed to Louis Grayle in the
narrative? I would not pursue that conjecture. Against it my reason rose
up half alarmed, half disdainful. Some one must have entered the room,
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-rooms, 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-hysterica