"At midnight my plan was complete."
As he paused, and the conclusion became clear to me, I was taken with a kind of stupor.
"A few days later," he said, "as she stood gazing down through the twilight, a man emerged from the forest, in face and dress the image of that other Antonio di Manzecca. At his signal, servants in the old-time livery of the Manzecca appeared with a ladder, which they leaned against the ramparts. He set foot upon the platform. Her pallor turned deathlike; her eyes became blank; she fainted in his arms. When she recovered she was in the Castle of Manzecca.
"That shock had restored her reason.
"Now everything around her very artfully suggested the sixteenth century—the furniture, the most trivial utensils, the costume of the humblest person in the castle. Nuta attended her. The convalescent was told that she had been ill in consequence of the attack on her lover, but that he, instead of succumbing, had been spirited away and stealthily nursed back to health. Again whole, he had returned to avenge himself on his brother, whom he had killed. Meanwhile her father had died. Therefore she had been brought from the Castle of Foscone to the Castle of Manzecca to enjoy the protection of her Antonio, whom she was now free to marry.
"All this was what she wanted to believe, so she believed it."
But Antonio's face was filled with a new distress. He rose, to pace the floor with the gestures of a man who realizes that he is locked in a cell to which there is no key.
"In the restoration of her mind," he groaned, "my own peace of mind has been destroyed. Even this love, the strangest and most thrilling in the world, will never allay the heartquakes that I have brought upon myself.
"With her perception of time restored, she will now be subject to time like other mortals. As year follows year, her youthfulness will merge into maturity, her maturity into old age, here in this castle, where nothing must ever suggest that she has attained a century other than her own. For me that means a ceaseless vigilance and fear. My devotion will always be mingled with forebodings of some blunder, some unforeseen intrusion of the present, some lightning-like revelation of the truth to her."