And though I trembled, my eyes answered “No.”

For some reason which I cannot at all explain, I suddenly took off my overcoat, and, drawing aside the screen which ran across the corner of the room at my right hand, forming a primitive sort of wardrobe, I hung it on one of the hooks.  I had to feel with my fingers for the hook, because I kept my gaze on the figure.

“I will go into the bedroom,” I said.

And I half-turned to pass through the doorway.  Then I stopped.  If I did so, the eyes of the ghost would be upon my back, and I felt that I could only withstand that glance by meeting it.  To have it on my back!...  Doubtless I was going mad.  However, I went backwards through the doorway, and then rapidly stepped out of sight of the apparition, and sat down upon the bed.

Useless!  I must return.  The mere idea of the empty sitting-room—­empty with the ghost in it—­filled me with a new and stranger fear.  Horrible happenings might occur in that room, and I must be there to see them!  Moreover, the ghost’s gaze must not fall on nothing; that would be too appalling (without doubt I was mad); its gaze must meet something, otherwise it would travel out into space further and further till it had left all the stars and waggled aimless in the ether:  the notion of such a calamity was unbearable.  Besides, I was hungry for that gaze; my eyes desired those eyes; if that glance did not press against them, they would burst from my head and roll on the floor, and I should be compelled to go down on my hands and knees and grope in search for them.  No, no, I must return to the sitting-room.  And I returned.

The gaze met me in the doorway.  And now there was something novel in it—­an added terror, a more intolerable menace, a silent imprecation so frightful that no human being could suffer it.  I sank to the ground, and as I did so I shrieked, but it was an unheard shriek, sounding only within the brain.  And in reply to that unheard shriek I heard the unheard voice of the ghost crying, “Yield!”

I would not yield.  Crushed, maddened, tortured by a worse than any physical torture, I would not yield.  But I wanted to die.  I felt that death would be sweet and utterly desirable.  And so thinking, I faded into a kind of coma, or rather a state which was just short of coma.  I had not lost consciousness, but I was conscious of nothing but the gaze.

“Good-by, Rosa,” I whispered.  “I’m beaten, but my love has not been conquered.”

The next thing I remembered was the paleness of the dawn at the window.  The apparition had vanished for that night, and I was alive.  But I knew that I had touched the skirts of death; I knew that after another such night I should die.

The morning chocolate arrived, and by force of habit I consumed it.  I felt no interest in any earthly thing; my sole sensation was a dread of the coming night, which all too soon would be upon me.  For several hours I sat, pale and nerveless, in my room, despising myself for a weakness and a fear which I could not possibly avoid.  I was no longer my own master; I was the slave, the shrinking chattel of a ghost, and the thought of my condition was a degradation unspeakable.