But how futile were such arguments!  Whatever the power might be, the fact that the ghost had indeed a power over me was indisputable.  All day I had felt the spectral sword of it suspended above my head.  My timid footsteps lingering on the way to the hotel sufficiently proved its power.  The experiences of the previous night might be merely subjective—­conceptions of the imagination—­but they were no less real, no less fatal to me on that account.

Once I had an idea of not going to the hotel that night at all.  But of what use could such an avoidance be?  The apparition was bound by no fetters to that terrible sitting-room of mine.  I might be put to the ordeal anywhere, even here in the thoroughfares of the city, and upon the whole I preferred to return to my lodging.  Nay, I was the victim of a positive desire for that scene of my torture.

I returned.  It was eleven o’clock.  The apparition awaited me.  But this time it was not seated in the chair.  It stood with its back to the window, and its gaze met mine as I entered the room.  I did not close the door, and my eyes never left its face.  The sneer on its thin lips was bitterer, more devilishly triumphant, than before.  Erect, motionless, and inexorable, the ghost stood there, and it seemed to say:  “What is the use of leaving the door open?  You dare not escape.  You cannot keep away from me.  To-night you shall die of sheer terror.”

With a wild audacity I sat down in the very chair which it had occupied, and drummed my fingers on the writing-table.  Then I took off my hat, and with elaborate aim pitched it on to a neighboring sofa.  I was making a rare pretence of carelessness.  But moment by moment, exactly as before, my courage and resolution oozed out of me, drawn away by that mystic presence.

Once I got up filled with a brilliant notion.  I would approach the apparition; I would try to touch it.  Could I but do so, it would vanish; I felt convinced it would vanish.  I got up, as I say, but I did not approach the ghost.  I was unable to move forward, held by a nameless dread.  I dropped limply back into the chair.  The phenomena of the first night repeated themselves, but more intensely, with a more frightful torture.  Once again I sought relief from the agony of that gaze by retreating into the bedroom; once again I was compelled by the same indescribable fear to return, and once again I fell down, smitten by a new and more awful menace, a kind of incredible blasphemy which no human thought can convey.

And now the ghost moved mysteriously and ominously towards me.  With an instinct of defence, cowed as I was upon the floor, I raised my hand to ward it off.  Useless attempt!  It came near and nearer, imperceptibly moving.

“Let me die in peace,” I said within my brain.

But it would not.  Not only must I die, but in order to die I must traverse all the hideous tortures of the soul which that lost spirit had learnt in its dire wanderings.