He went to the corner where the stone cubes were, and sat down where he had sat on the evening before. For a little time he gave himself up to thoughts of the blissful moment that had come to him amid storm and tempest. He lived them over again; and, naturally enough, his mind ran on into the future. What should it bring? Would he ever be permitted to make the daughter of an English nobleman his wife?
“But she loves me! She loves me!” he cried in tones of rapture; “and with her dear love I will be content. If darkness and disaster must come, I will not court it. I will love her while life is mine, and love shall be my joy. Oh! that can not be taken from me! That is a part of myself that will endure while I live, and can only die when I am done with earth.”
Shortly after this he gave his attention to the business on which he came. He looked first and calculated the direction in which the spectral figure had gone after passing the center of the chapel.
It had been directly toward the altar, and there, very nearly at the right-hand corner of the huge block of stone as he stood facing it, the figure had last been seen.
He now approached the altar and looked around upon the pavement in its neighborhood. It—the pavement—was composed of flags of a bluish-gray stone, square in form and fully three feet across, laid in cement. He got down upon his knees and with the strong blade of his pocket-knife sought to find a crack or a crevice of any kind between the stones of the floor.
But his search was vain. Fully half an hour was spent thus, and to no effect. The pavement over that whole part of the chapel was as intact, as firm and solid as though it had been a single mass, without break or flaw.
Where could it be? He examined the altar itself. Certainly there was no possible opening in any part of that. It was a single block of stone, without flaw or blemish.
The explorer looked around at the open windows. Not by any one of them could the seeming monk have gone. That was decided at once. Where then?
Had the whole thing been a wild, fantastical hallucination? Only a dream? Could it be possible that they had seen nothing?
Could it be that the very excursion itself, together with what he had deemed the most rapturous event of his life—could that have been but a baseless vision of his distempered brain?