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 impassivity upon

the girl. I trembled, all hope and all despair, for the issue. She

would not be vanquished. Her love was stronger than its hate; her love

knew not the name of fear. For a thousand nights, so it seemed, the

two remained thus, at grips, as it were, in a death-struggle. Then

with a reluctant gesture of abdication the ghost waved a hand; its

terrible features softened into a consent, and slowly it faded away.

As I lay there Rosa bent over me, and put her arms round my neck, and

I could feel on my face the caress of her hair, and the warm baptism

of her tears--tears of joy.

* * * * *

I raised her gently. I laid her on the sofa, and with a calm, blissful

expectancy awaited the moment when her eyes should open. Ah! I may not

set down here the sensation of relief which spread through my being as I

realized with every separate brain-cell that I was no longer a victim,

the doomed slave of an evil and implacable power, but a free man--free

to live, free to love, exempt from the atrocious influences of the

nether sphere. I saw that ever since the first encounter in Oxford

Street my existence had been under a shadow, dark and malign and always

deepening, and that this shadow was now magically dissipated in the

exquisite dawn of a new day. And I gave thanks, not only to Fate, but to

the divine girl who in one of those inspirations accorded only to

genius had conceived the method of my enfranchisement, and so nobly

carried it out.

Her eyelids wavered, and she looked at me.




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