If she was not changed, I ought to
be able to find her somewhere within this great Babylon of ours.
Wisdom told me to set the police upon her track, but pride bade me
try every other means first. So with the feverish energy of one
leading a forlorn hope, I began to pace the streets if haply I might
see her face shine upon me from the crowd of passers by; a foolish
fancy, unproductive of result! I not only failed to see her, but
anyone like her.
In the midst of the despair occasioned by this failure a thought
flashed across me or rather a remembrance. One night not long since,
being uncommonly restless, I had risen from my bed, dressed me and
gone out into the yard back of my house for a little air. It was an
unusual thing for me to do but I seemed to be suffocating where I
was, and nothing else would satisfy me. As you already surmise, it was
the night on which disappeared the sewing girl of which you have so
often spoken, but I knew nothing of that, my thoughts were far from
my own home and its concerns. You may judge what a state of mind I was
in when I tell you that I even thought at one moment while I paused
before the gate leading into --- Street that I saw the face of her
with whom my thoughts were ever busy, peering upon me through the
bars.
"You tell me that I did see a girl there, and that it was the one who
had lived as sewing woman in my house; it may be so, but at the time
I considered it a vision of my wife, and the remembrance of it,
coming as it did after my repeated failures to encounter her in the
street, worked a change in my plans.
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