We looked at each other, Rosa and I, across the couch of Alresca.

All the vague and terrible apprehensions, disquietudes, misgivings,

which the gradual improvement in Alresca's condition had lulled to

sleep, aroused themselves again in my mind, coming, as it were, boldly

out into the open from the dark, unexplored grottos wherein they had

crouched and hidden. And I went back in memory to those sinister days

in London before I had brought Alresca to Bruges, days over which a

mysterious horror had seemed to brood.

I felt myself adrift in a sea of frightful suspicions. I remembered

Alresca's delirium on the night of his accident, and his final

hallucination concerning the blank wall in the dressing-room (if

hallucination it was), also on that night. I remembered his outburst

against Rosetta Rosa. I remembered Emmeline Smith's outburst against

Rosetta Rosa. I remembered the vision in the crystal, and Rosa's

sudden and astoundingly apt breaking in upon that vision. I remembered

the scene between Rosa and Sir Cyril Smart, and her almost hysterical

impulse to pierce her own arm with the little jewelled dagger. I

remembered the glint of the dagger which drew my attention to it on

the curb of an Oxford Street pavement afterwards. I remembered the

disappearance of Sir Cyril Smart. I remembered all the inexplicable

circumstances of Alresca's strange decay, and his equally strange

recovery. I remembered that his recovery had coincided with an entire

absence of communication between himself and Rosa.... And then she

comes! And within an hour he is dead! "I love her. He has come again.

This time it is--" How had Alresca meant to finish that sentence? "He

has come again." Who had come again? Was there, then, another man

involved in the enigma of this tragedy? Was it the man I had seen

opposite the Devonshire Mansion on the night when I had found the

dagger? Or was "he" merely an error for "she"? "I love her. She has

come again." That would surely make better sense than what Alresca

had actually written? And he must have been mentally perturbed. Such a

slip was possible. No, no! When a man, even a dying man, is writing a

message which he has torn out of his heart, he does not put "he" for

"she" ... "I love her...." Then, had he misjudged her heart when he

confided in me during the early part of the evening? Or had the sudden

apparition of Rosa created his love anew? Why had she once refused

him? She seemed to be sufficiently fond of him. But she had killed

him. Directly or indirectly she had been the cause of his death.

And as I looked at her, my profound grief for Alresca made me her

judge. I forgot for the instant the feelings with which she had once

inspired me, and which, indeed, had never died in my soul.




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