By this time Bradley’s brain had cleared, and he was better able to grasp the horrible reality of the situation. It was quite clear to him that the sibyl was either an utter impostor, or a person whose mental faculties were darkened by fitful clouds of insanity. What startled and horrified him most of all was the utter want of maidenly shame, the curious and weird sang-froid, with which she made her extraordinary confession. Her frankness, so far as it went, was something terrible--or, as the Scotch express it, ‘uncanny.’ Across his recollection, as he looked and listened, came the thought of one of these mysterious sibyls, familiar to mediæval superstition, who come into the world with all the outward form and beauty of women, but without a Soul, but who might gain a spiritual existence in some mysterious way by absorbing the souls of men. The idea was a ghastly one, in harmony with his distempered fancy, and he could not shake it away.
‘Tell me,’ said Eustasia gently, ‘tell me one thing, now I have told you so much. Is that poor lady dead indeed--I mean the lady you used to love?’
The question went into his heart like a knife, and with livid face he rose to Ins feet.
‘Do not speak of her!’ he cried. ‘I cannot bear it--it is blasphemy! Miserable woman, do you think that you will ever be forgiven for tampering, as you have done, with the terrible truth of death? I came to you in the last despairing hope that among all the phantoms you have conjured up before me there might be some reality; for I was blind and mad, and scarcely knew what I did. If it is any satisfaction to you, know that you have turned the world into a tomb for me, and destroyed my last faint ray of faith in a living God. In my misery, I clung to the thought of your spirit world; and I came to you for some fresh assurance that such a world might be. All that is over now. It is a cheat and a fraud like all the rest.’
With these words he left her, passing quickly from the room. Directly afterwards she heard the street door close behind him. Tottering to the window, she looked down in the street, and saw him stalk rapidly by, his white face set hard as granite, his eyes looking steadily before him, fixed on vacancy. As he disappeared, she uttered a low cry of pain, and placed her hand upon her heart.