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