I began at the beginning, turning over the pages carefully one by one, and recognising what I had read overnight. By the time I had come to the end of the first chapter I felt more assured. But when I turned over to the second, it was totally unfamiliar. I had certainly never read a word of it before; and its heading was “On Ordinary Somnambulism.”
I went on turning the pages, feeling as if I was bewitched, until I came to the end; but there was no chapter that even alluded to any doctrine of transmigration, and certainly no heading bearing the faintest resemblance to that curious title, “On the Age of Souls.”
“It is most extraordinary!” I cried. “I could swear to having read what I told you about. I remember the very words and the quaint turning of the phrases.”
He asked me how I had read it; then laughed at me.
“I hit the mark when I said you were dreaming, Hamlet,” he said. “It has often happened to me to continue thinking after dropping asleep, and nice bathos the thoughts are!”
He dismissed the matter as a joke; but it was no joke to me. I was bewildered. When I think of it now the bewilderment is greater, the sense of confused perceptions more alarming.
During the talk which followed, I tried to gain a clue to the strange lady I met in the grounds. I casually alluded to the asylum in the neighbourhood, and asked if the authorities there were not almost lax in their vigilance.
“I cannot help thinking that I met an escaped madwoman, when I was taking a walk early this morning,” I said. “She looked, and I think must be, insane.”
“You could not have met a lady patient of Dr. Walters’, my dear Hamlet,” said Sir Roderick.
I asked, “Why not?”