l, I felt that any idea of sleeping after all
that I had seen and heard was out of the question; so I lit my pipe,
and, sitting by the window--how it refreshed my mind just then to look
at the calm moonlight!--tried to think what it would be best to do. In
the first place, any appeal to doctors or to Alfred's friends in England
was out of the question. I could not persuade myself that his intellect
was sufficiently disordered to justify me, under existing circumstances,
in disclosing the secret which he had intrusted to my keeping. In the
second place, all attempts on my part to induce him to abandon the idea
of searching out his uncle's remains would be utterly useless after what
I had incautiously said to him. Having settled these two conclusions,
the only really great difficulty which remained to perplex me was
whether I was justified in aiding him to execute his extraordinary
purpose.

Supposing that, with my help, he found Mr. Monkton's body, and took
it back with him to England, was it right in me thus to lend myself to
promoting the marriage which would most likely follow these events--a
marriage which it might be the duty of every one to prevent at all
hazards? This set me thinking about the extent of his madness, or to
speak more mildly and more correctly, of his delusion. Sane he certainly
was on all ordinary subjects; nay, in all the narrative parts of what
he had said to me on this very evening he had spoken clearly and
connectedly. As for the story of the apparition, other men, with
intellects as clear as the intellects of their neighbors had fancied
themselves pursued by a phantom, and had even written about it in a
high strain of philosophical speculation. It was plain that the real
hallucination in the case now before me lay in Monkton's conviction
of the truth of the old prophecy, and in his idea that the fancied
apparition was a supernatural warning to him to evade its denunciations;
and it was equally clear that both delusions had been produced, in the
first instance, by the lonely life he had led acting on a naturally
excitable temperament, which was rendered further liable to moral
disease by an hereditary taint of insanity.

Was this curable? Miss Elmslie, who knew him far better than I did,
seemed by her conduct to think so. Had I any reason or right to
determine offhand that she was mistaken? Supposing I refused to go to
the frontier with him, he would then most certainly depart by himself,
to