Loyd Morton shivered as the door closed heavily upon his departing form, and he crept to the window, raised the drapery, and stood staring blindly out upon the darkening landscape.
For the first time since the beginning of his weird experience, the voice of conscience asserted itself, weakening his resolution to the extent of making a partial coward of him.
"God help me!" he mentally ejaculated; "would to heaven that I had foreseen this disastrous complication before I entered into a covenant with death! Far be it from me to interfere with the love and hope of any man. But what can I do now, if, as I believe, it is Paula's soul that has returned to comfort me in my loneliness? How can I give her up to any other man to love and cherish? Were I to betray her thus, outrage her confidence in me, and doom her to a spiritual hell on earth, how could I face her when at last we meet in the life to come? Heaven have mercy upon me and save me! rescue me from this awful doubt that the soul I love is not with me, is not incarnate here; that I am the victim of some Satanic wile that grants me the power to exert an infernal magnetism to the estrangement of fond and loyal hearts! O my God, rather let me die here and now, before I have consummated irreparable wrong!"
The desperate thought ended in a sharp gasp that voiced the surprise and almost superstitious awe which seized upon him as he felt a slender arm coil itself softly about his neck with soothing contact of cool flesh against his feverish cheek.
The gloom had deepened to darkness within the chamber, but in the deep embrasure of the window there lurked a faint after-glow of day, that ultimate flickering of our northern twilight that seems fraught alike with hinted promise and with lingering farewell. There is a witchery about the "sober livery" of that brief hour that lends itself to the imaginative soul and lays a magic spell upon the triteness of existence.
He knew that she had come to him, but for a moment he trembled in uncertainty.
"You are in doubt about me, Loyd?" she faltered, with a perspicacity that was the more startling by reason of her hesitation. "You think it best to relinquish all claim to me?"
"What think you yourself?" he asked in an agony of suspense.
"I am in doubt when you are."
"But when I am firm?"