In the griefs that followed, I often thought with myself that I would gladly die for a thousand years, might I then awake for one night in the haunted chamber, a ghost, among the ghosts who crowded its stained moonbeams, and see my dead Alice smiling across the glimmering rays, and beckoning me to the old nook, she, too, having come awake out of the sleep of death, in the dream of the haunted chamber. “Might we but sit there,” I said, “through the night, as of old, and love and comfort each other, till the moon go down, and the pale dawn, which is the night of the ghosts, begin to arise, then gladly would I go to sleep for another thousand years, in the hope that when I next became conscious of life, it might be in another such ghostly night, in the chamber of the ghosts.”
CHAPTER XVI. The Clanking Shoe.
Time passed. We began to feel very secure in that room, watched as it was by the sleepless sentry, Fear. One night I ventured to take a light with me.
“How nice to have a candle!” she said as I entered. “I hope they are all in bed, though. It will drive some of them into fits if they see the light.”
“I wanted to show you something I found in the library to-day.”
“What is it?”
I opened a book, and showed her a paper inside it, with some verses written on it.
“Whose writing is that?” I asked.
“Yours, of course. As if I did not know your writing!”