nd accusing him of the murder of Haroun;
the night in the moonlit pavilion at Derval Court; the baneful influence
on Lilian; the struggle between me and himself in the house by the
seashore,--the strange All that is told in this Strange Story.

But warming as I spoke, and in a kind of fierce joy to be enabled thus
to free my own heart of the doubts that had burdened it, now that I
was fairly face to face with the being by whom my reason had been so
perplexed and my life so tortured. I was restrained by none of the fears
lest my own fancy deceived me, with which in his absence I had striven
to reduce to natural causes the portents of terror and wonder. I stated
plainly, directly, the beliefs, the impressions which I had never dared
even to myself to own without seeking to explain them away. And coming
at last to a close, I said: "Such are the evidences that seem to me to
justify abhorrence of the life that you ask me to aid in prolonging.
Your own tale of last night but confirms them. And why to me--to me--do
you come with wild entreaties to lengthen the life that has blighted
my own? How did you even learn the home in which I sought unavailing
refuge? How--as your hint to Faber clearly revealed--were you aware
that, in yon house, where the sorrow is veiled, where the groan is
suppressed, where the foot-tread falls ghostlike, there struggles now
between life and death my heart's twin, my world's sunshine? Ah!
through my terror for her, is it a demon that tells you how to bribe my
abhorrence into submission, and supple my reason into use to your ends?"

Margrave had listened to me throughout with a fixed attention, at times
with a bewildered stare, at times with exclamations of surprise, but
not of denial. And when I had done, he remained for some moments silent,
seemingly stupefied, passing his hand repeatedly over his brow, in the
gesture so familiar to him in former days.

At length he said quietly, without evincing any sign either of
resentment or humiliation,--

"In much that you tell me I recognize myself; in much I am as lost in
amazement as you in wild doubt or fierce wrath. Of the effect that you
say Philip Derval produced on me I have no recollection. Of himself I
have only this,--that he was my foe, that he came to England intent on
schemes to shorten my life or destroy its enjoyments. All my faculties
tend to self-preservation; there, they converge as rays in a focus; in
that focus they illume and--they bur