“I was frozen with fear, and I could not put faith in his assurances. Suddenly remembering that the night before, I had received from my confessor a reliquary containing a bit of the true cross, I went for it to my cabinet, and slipped it carefully into my bosom. ‘Be it so, sir,’ I said to him. ‘Come, I am ready to listen to you.’ Be just to me, my friend. You have never known me to be a coward. I retain all my faculties; very well, I swear to you that to be there, alone with such a companion, I had to summon all my powers of body and soul. After carefully closing the door, the Man in Black said to me: ‘Mademoiselle, it is the work of an honest man I am about to accomplish. I do but ask of you to be secret upon the disclosure I am about to make to you, and I believe you to be too entirely a woman of honour to do harm to a person whose sole desire is to make things agreeable to you.’
“This preamble was sufficiently reassuring; but my horror of him was hardly less intense, and I kept the holy relic close pressed against my bosom, to ward off the influences of the spirit of evil. The Man in Black drew forward a chair for me, and seated himself on a stool beside me.
“‘I am not the devil, Mademoiselle,’ he continued. ‘I am not even the same who once had the honour of paying you a visit.’
“I trembled, but looked at him with a little less terror.
“‘What, sir, you are not—’
“‘No,’ said he, without permitting me to finish my sentence, ‘it was my father.’
“‘Your father?’
“‘Yes, a Portuguese Jew, who profoundly studied the art of healing. I bear him a very close resemblance, Mademoiselle.’
“‘It is terrible, sir.’
“‘All the more that I have been careful to wear the same clothes. The resemblance is my fortune. Countless people have been deceived as you have been; but your mistake might have grave consequences, and that is why I disabuse you.’