‘And all the rest was of a piece with that! Well, I could have forgiven you everything but having personified one who is now lost to me for ever.’
‘I never did. I suppose you wished to see her, and she came to you out of the spirit-land.’
‘Now you are lying to me again.’
‘Don’t you think I’m lying,’ was the answer; ‘for its gospel-truth I’m telling you. I’m not so bad as you think me, not half so bad.’
Again shrinking from lier, lie looked at her with aimer and loathing.
‘The device was exposed to-day,’ he said sternly. ‘You spoke to me with her voice, and when I turned up the light I found that I was holding in my arms no spirit, but yourself.’
‘Well, I’m not denying that’s true,’ she answered with another laugh. ‘Something came over me—I don’t know how it happened—and then, all at one, I was kissing you, and I had broken the conditions.’
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.