“One day when, for the first time in several weeks, I was in possession of my normal faculties, Ragobah came into my room and sat down beside me.  I arose instantly and fled to the farther corner of the apartment.  He pursued me and sought to conquer my all too apparent aversion for him by terms of endearment, but the more he pressed his suit the more my loathing grew until, maddened by references made to Darrow Sahib, I lost all self-control and permitted him to learn my detestation of him.  He heard me through in silence, his face growing darker with every word, and when I had finished said with slow and studied malice: 

“’You forget that you are my wife and that I can follow my entreaty by command.  You spurn my love.  You are not yet weaned from that English cur whose life, let me tell you, is in my hands.  Fool, can you not see how powerless you are?  I have but to will you to kill him and your first cursed failure on Malabar Hill will be washed out with his infidel blood.  You will do well to yield peaceably.  The thread of your very existence passes through my hands, to cut or tangle it as I list—­yield you must!’ With this he strode frantically from the room, leaving me more dead than alive.  As he disclosed his fiendish secret something about my heart kept tightening with every word till, at length, it seemed as if it must burst, so terrible was the pressure.  I could not breathe.  My lungs seemed filled with molten lead.  How long this agony continued I do not know, for the thread of consciousness broke under its terrible tension and I fell senseless upon the floor.

“When I recovered from my swoon the inexpressible horror of my situation again descended upon my spirit like a snuffer upon a candle.  I was Ragobah’s wife, his slave, his tool, as powerless to resist his will as if I were one of his limbs.  All was now clear.  The long sleep, crowded with unremembered dreams, represented the period when I was under Ragobah’s control,—­the horrible night on Malabar Hill being one of them,—­and the waking moments, those periods when my feeble, overridden consciousness flickered back to dimly light for a time the gloom of this intellectual night.  There was no hope for me.  Already had I been so dominated by his will and inspired by his malice as to attempt the life of my lover.  What might I not be made to do in future?  As I thought of this, Ragobah’s last threat rang with a sinister warning upon my ears till it seemed as if it would drive me into madness.  The suspicion grew to be a certainty from which there was but one means of escape—­death—­and I determined at once to embrace it before I could be made the instrument for the infliction of further injury upon my lover.  I seized a little dagger which in my normal moments I always kept concealed about me, and was about to plunge it into my bosom when I was smitten by the thought,—­and it cut me as the steel could not have done,—­that Darrow Sahib would never know the truth, and that