’That seems to say,
  I know you love me, Mr Grey;’

is it not traced there—­all, every line, as clear as when it brightened the atmosphere about you in the days that are no more?  To be sure it is; and being so, the thing must exist—­somewhere.

I never was more fully possessed with this conviction than once during the winter of last year.  It was Christmas-eve.  I was sitting alone, in my old armchair, and had been looking forward to the fast-coming festival-day with many mingled thoughts—­some tender, but regretful; others hopeful, yet sad; some serious, and even solemn.  As I laid my head back and sat thus with closed eyes, listening to the church-clock as it struck the hour, I could not but feel that I was passing—­very slowly and gently it is true—­towards a time when the closing of the grave would shut out even that sound so familiar to my ear; and when other and more precious sounds of life-human voices, dearer than all else, would cease to have any meanings for me—­and even their very echoes be hushed in the silence of the one long sleep.  Following the train of association, it was natural that I should recur to the hour when that same church’s bells had chimed my wedding-peal.  I seemed to hear their music once again; and other music sweeter still—­the music of young vows that ‘kept the word of promise to the ear, and broke it’ not ’to the hope.’  Next in succession came the recollection of my children.  I seemed to lose sight of their present identity, and to be carried away in thought to times and scenes far back in my long-departed youth, when they were growing up around my knees—­beautiful forms of all ages, from the tender nursling of a single year springing with outstretched arms into my bosom, to the somewhat rough but ingenuous boy of ten.  As my inner eye traced their different outlines, and followed them in their graceful growth from year to year, my heart was seized with a sudden and irresistible longing to hold fast these beloved but passing images of the brain.  What joy, I thought, would it be to transfix the matchless beauty which had wrought itself thus into the visions of my old age! to preserve for ever, unchanging, every varied phase of that material but marvellous structure which the glorious human soul had animated and informed through all its progressive stages from the child to the man!

Scarcely was the thought framed when a dull, heavy weight seemed to press upon my closed eyelids.  I now saw more clearly even than before my children’s images in the different stages of their being.  But I saw these, and these alone, as they stood rooted to the ground, with a stony fixedness in their eyes:  every other object grew dim before me.  The living faces and full-grown forms which until now had mingled with and played their part among my younger phantoms, altogether disappeared.  I had no longer any eyes, any soul, but for this my new spectre-world.  Life, and the things of life, had lost their interest; and I knew of nothing, conceived of nothing, but those still, inanimate forms from which the informing soul had long since passed away.