Is it I who am writing thus, and on the same leaf which, closed up in haste when I was fetched to the hospital, I have just had such an anxious search for, that it might be instantly burnt. Yet, I find there is nothing in it that I need have feared—nothing that could, in any way, have signified to anybody, unless, perhaps, the writing of that one name.
Shall I never get over this absurd folly—this absolute monomania?—when there are hundreds of the same name to be met with every day—when, after all, it is not exactly the name!
Yet this is what it cost me. Let me write it down, that the confession in plain English of such utter insanity may in degree have the same effect as when I have sat down and desired a patient to recount to me, one by one, each and all of his delusions, in order that, in the mere telling of them, they might perhaps vanish.
I went away from that hall-door at once. Never asking—nor do I think for my life I could ask, the simple question that would have set all doubt at rest. I walked across country, up and down, along road or woodland, I hardly knew whither, for miles—following the moon-rise. She seemed to rise just as she did nineteen years ago—nineteen years, ten months, all but two days—my arithmetic is correct, no fear! She lifted herself like a ghost over those long level waves of moor, till she sat, blood-red, upon the horizon, with a stare which there was nothing to break, nothing to hide from—nothing between her and me, but the plain and the sky—just as it was that night.
What am I writing? Is the old horror coming back again. It cannot. It must be kept at bay..
A knock—ah, I see; it is the sergeant of poor Carter's company. I must return to daily work, and labour is life—to me.
CHAPTER III. HIS STORY.
Sept. 30th:—Not a case to set down to-day. This high moorland is your best sanatorium. My “occupation's gone.”