wild audacity I sat down in the very chair which it had
occupied, and drummed my fingers on the writing-table. Then I took off
my hat, and with elaborate aim pitched it on to a neighboring sofa. I
was making a rare pretence of carelessness. But moment by moment,
exactly as before, my courage and resolution oozed out of me, drawn
away by that mystic presence.

Once I got up filled with a brilliant notion. I would approach the
apparition; I would try to touch it. Could I but do so, it would
vanish; I felt convinced it would vanish. I got up, as I say, but I
did not approach the ghost. I was unable to move forward, held by a
nameless dread. I dropped limply back into the chair. The phenomena of
the first night repeated themselves, but more intensely, with a more
frightful torture. Once again I sought relief from the agony of that
gaze by retreating into the bedroom; once again I was compelled by the
same indescribable fear to return, and once again I fell down, smitten
by a new and more awful menace, a kind of incredible blasphemy which
no human thought can convey.

And now the ghost moved mysteriously and ominously towards me. With an
instinct of defence, cowed as I was upon the floor, I raised my hand
to ward it off. Useless attempt! It came near and nearer,
imperceptibly moving.

"Let me die in peace," I said within my brain.

But it would not. Not only must I die, but in order to die I must
traverse all the hideous tortures of the soul which that lost spirit
had learnt in its dire wanderings.

The ghost stood over me, impending like a doom. Then it suddenly
looked towards the door, startled, and the door swung on its hinges. A
girl entered--a girl dressed in black, her shoulders and bosom
gleaming white against the dark attire, a young girl with the
heavenliest face on this earth. Casting herself on her knees before
the apparition, she raised to that dreadful spectre her countenance
transfigured by the ecstasy of a sublime appeal. It was Rosa.

Can I describe what followed? Not adequately, only by imperfect hints.
These two faced each other, Rosa and the apparition. She uttered no
word. But I, in my stupor, knew that she was interceding with the
spectre for my life. Her lovely eyes spoke to it of its old love, its
old magnanimity, and in the name of that love and that magnanimity
called upon it to renounce the horrible vengeance of which I was the
victim.

For long the spectre gazed with stern and formidable