A hundred times I tried to laugh, and said to myself that I was the victim of fancy, that I should see nothing further of this prodigious apparition; that, in short, my brain had been overtaxed by recent events, and I had suffered from delusions.  Vain and conventional self-deceptions!  At the bottom of my soul lay always the secret and profound conviction that I was doomed, cursed, caught in the toils of a relentless foe who was armed with all the strange terrors of the unknown; a foe whose onslaughts it was absolutely impossible for me to parry.

As the hours passed a yearning to see Rosa, to be near her, came upon me.  I fought against it, fearing I know not what as the immediate consequence.  I wished to temporize, or, at any rate, to decide upon a definite course of conduct before I saw her again.  But towards evening I felt that I should yield to the impulse to behold her.  I said to myself, as though I needed some excuse, that she would have a great deal of trouble with the arrangements for Sir Cyril’s funeral, and that I ought to offer my assistance; that, indeed, I ought to have offered my assistance early in the day.

I presented myself after dinner.  She was dressed in black, and her manner was nervous, flurried, ill at ease.  We shook hands very formally, and then could find nothing to say to each other.  Had she, with a woman’s instinct, guessed, from that instant’s view of the thing in the chair last night, all that was involved for me in our love?  If not all, she had guessed most of it.  She had guessed that the powerful spirit of Lord Clarenceux was inimical, fatally inimical, to me.  None knew better than herself the terrible strength of his jealousy.  I wondered what were her thoughts, her secret desires.

At length she began to speak of commonplace matters.

“Guess who has called,” she said, with a little smile.

“I give it up,” I said, with a smile as artificial as her own.

“Mrs. Sullivan Smith.  She and Sullivan Smith are on their way home from Bayreuth; they are at the Hotel du Rhin.  She wanted to know all about what happened in the Rue Thiers, and to save trouble I told her.  She stayed a long time.  There have been a lot of callers.  I am very tired.  I—­I expected you earlier.  But you are not listening.”

I was not.  I was debating whether or not to show her Alresca’s letter.  I decided to do so, and I handed it to her there and then.

“Read that,” I murmured.

She read it in silence, and then looked at me.  Her tender eyes were filled with tears.  I cast away all my resolutions of prudence, of wariness, before that gaze.  Seizing her in my arms, I kissed her again and again.

“I have always suspected—­what—­what Alresca says,” she murmured.

“But you love me?” I cried passionately.

“Do you need to be told, my poor Carl?” she replied, with the most exquisite melancholy.

“Then I’ll defy hell itself!” I said.