aggled 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.

During the afternoon a ray of hope flashed upon me. Mrs. Sullivan
Smith was at the Hotel du Rhin, so Rosa had said; I would call on
her. I remembered her strange demeanor to me on the occasion of our
first meeting, and afterwards at the reception. It seemed clear to me
now that she must have known something. Perhaps she might help me.

I found her in a garish apartment too full of Louis Philippe
furniture, robed in a crimson tea-gown, and apparently doing nothing
whatever. She had the calm quiescence of a Spanish woman. Yet wh