Fabio waited for a moment, painfully collecting his ideas. He looked at the valet, and Finello signed to the man to withdraw.
“Was it the heat?” repeated D’Arbino.
“No,” answered Fabio, in strangely hushed, steady tones. “I have seen the face that was behind the yellow mask.”
“Well?”
“It was the face of my dead wife.”
“Your dead wife!”
“When the mask was removed I saw her face. Not as I remember it in the pride of her youth and beauty—not even as I remember her on her sick-bed—but as I remember her in her coffin.”
“Count! for God’s sake, rouse yourself! Collect your thoughts—remember where you are—and free your mind of its horrible delusion.”
“Spare me all remonstrances; I am not fit to bear them. My life has only one object now—the pursuing of this mystery to the end. Will you help me? I am scarcely fit to act for myself.”
He still spoke in the same unnaturally hushed, deliberate tones. D’Arbino and Finello exchanged glances behind him as he rose from the sofa on which he had hitherto been lying.