The Story Continued by Marian Halcombe

weary body was at rest, and in a trance, or daydream of my fancy⁠—I know not what to call it⁠—I saw Walter Hartright. I had not thought of him since I rose that morning⁠—Laura had not said one word to me either directly or indirectly referring to him⁠—and yet I saw him now as plainly as if the past time had returned, and we were both together again at Limmeridge House. He appeared to me as one among many other men, none of whose faces I could plainly discern. They were all lying on the steps of an immense ruined temple. Colossal tropical trees⁠—with rank creepers twining endlessly about their trunks, and hideous stone idols glimmering and grinning at intervals behind leaves and stalks and branches⁠—surrounded the temple and shut out the sky, and threw a dismal shadow over the forlorn band of men on the steps. White exhalations twisted and curled up stealthily from the ground, approached the men in wreaths like smoke, touched them, and stretched them out dead, one by one, in the places where they lay. An agony of pity and fear for Walter loosened my tongue, and I implored him to escape. “Come back, come back!” I said. “Remember your promise to her and to me . Come back to us before the pestilence reaches you and lays you dead like the rest!” He looked at me with an unearthly quiet in his face. “Wait,” he said, “I shall come back. The night when I met the lost woman on the highway was the night which set my life apart to be the instrument of a design that is yet unseen. Here, lost in the wilderness, or there, welcomed back in the land of my birth, I am still walking on the dark road which leads me, and you, and the sister of your love