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120 deliver him despatches for the Principalities and Asiatic Turkey. Erceldoune was impatient to be on the move, and feel himself in saddle once more; while in inaction, too, he was no nearer on his quest—of those who had attacked his life, and of the one who had saved it. Phantom, hallucination, delirious memory, be it what it would, the remembrance which haunted him, and which he had no single proof was anything more tangible than a fever-born fancy, was strong on him—the stronger the more he thrust it away. The woman who had rescued him, and who had since been lost to him in the darkness of mystery and the wide wilderness of the world, he could not recall, save by such intangible unsubstantiated recollection as had remained to him from unconsciousness; common reason told him that it could be but a folly which haunted the brain from the visions of his long peril, but reason failed to drive it out, or shake the first impression which had ever wakened or seized his imagination. The idea which pursued him, the face he had painted in the monastic solitude of the convent, had become to him a living reality; he resisted it, he trampled it out; not unfrequently he recoiled and shuddered from it, as from the phantasia of impending insanity: but it remained there. Her face rose before him from the