At length I stood in the doorway leading to the bedroom.  I could feel the perspiration on my forehead and at the back of my neck.  I fronted the inscrutable white face of Lord Clarenceux, the lover of Rosetta Rosa; I met its awful eyes:  dark, invidious, fateful.  Ah, those eyes!  Even in my terror I could read in them all the history and the characteristics of Lord Clarenceux.  They were the eyes of one who could be of the highest and the lowest.  Mingled in their hardness was a melting softness, with their cruelty a large benevolence, with their hate a pitying tenderness, with their spirituality a hellish turpitude.  They were the eyes of two opposite men, and as I gazed into them they reconciled for me the conflicting accounts of Lord Clarenceux which I had heard from different people.

But, as far as I was concerned, that night the eyes held nothing but cruelty and disaster; though I could detect in them the other qualities, these qualities were not for me.  We faced each other, the apparition and I, and the struggle, silent and bitter as the grave, began.  Neither of us moved.  My arms were folded easily, but my nails pressed into the palms of my clenched hands.  My teeth were set, my lips tight together, my glance unswerving.  By sheer strength of endeavour I cast aside my fear of defeat, and in my heart I said with the profoundest conviction that I would love Rosa though the seven seas and all the continents give up their dead to frighten me.

So we remained, for how long I do not know.  It may have been only minutes—­I cannot tell.  Then gradually there came over me a feeling that the ghost in the chair was growing larger.  The ghastly inhuman sneer on his thin widening lips assaulted me like a giant’s malediction, and the light in the room seemed to become more brilliant till it was almost blinding.  This went on for a time, and once more I pulled myself together, collected my scattering senses, and seized again the courage of determination which had nearly slipped from me; but I knew that I must get away, out of sight of this moveless and diabolic figure, which did not speak, but which made known its commands by means of its eyes.  “Resign her,” the eyes said.  “Tear your love for her out of your heart!  Swear that you will never see her again—­or I will ruin you utterly, not now only but for evermore.”

I think I trembled; my eyes answered “No.”  For some reason which I cannot at all explain, I suddenly took off my overcoat, and, drawing aside the screen which ran across the corner of the room at my right hand, forming a primitive sort of wardrobe, I hung it on one of the hooks.  I had to feel with my fingers for the hook, because I kept my gaze on the figure.  “I will go into the bedroom,” I said; and I turned to pass through the doorway.  Then I stopped.  If I did so, the eyes of the ghost would be upon my back, and I felt that I could only withstand that glance by meeting it.  To have it on my back....  Doubtless I was going