As she had for years been a believer in spirits, the apparition did not surprise her, and yet she was tremendously excited.  “Burn it!” she echoed, “the valuable manuscript?  At which he laboured for so many weary hours?  Yet, doubtless, it would be wrong to preserve it.  Sin is the only rolling stone that gathers moss; what a gentleman, a scholar, a man of the world may write, when living, he would see very differently as a poor soul standing naked before its God, with its good or evil deeds alone to answer for, and their consequences visible to it from the first moment, rolling on to the end of time.  Oh, he would cry, for a friend on earth to stop and check them!  What would he care for the applause of fifteen hundred men now—­ for the whole world’s praise, and God offended?  And yet the book is for students only.  Six thousand guineas, too, is a large sum, and I have great need of it.”

At this moment the apparition again stood before her, and in a sterner and more authoritative voice said:  “Burn it!” and then again disappeared.  In her excitement she scarcely knew where she was or what she did.  Still she hesitated.  Then she soliloquised:  “It is his will, and what he wishes shall be done.  He loved me and worked for me.  How am I going to reward him?  In order that my wretched body may be fed and warmed for a few miserable years, shall I let his soul be left out in cold and darkness till the end of time—­ till all the sins which may be committed on reading those writings have been expiated, or passed away, perhaps, for ever?  Nafzawi, who was a pagan, begged pardon of God and prayed not to be cast into hell fire for having written it, and implored his readers to pray for him to Allah that he would have mercy on him."[FN#653]

Still she hesitated.  “It was his magnum opus,” she went on, “his last work that he was so proud of, that was to have been finished[FN#654] on the awful morrow that never came.  If I burn it the recollection will haunt me to my dying day,” and again she turned over the leaves.

Then for the third time Sir Richard stood before her.  Again he sternly bade her burn the manuscript, and, having added threatenings to his command, he again disappeared.

By this time her excitement had passed away, and a holy joy irradiated her soul.  She took up the manuscript, and then sorrowfully, reverently, and in fear and trembling, she burnt it sheet after sheet, until the whole was consumed.  As each leaf was licked up by the fire, it seemed to her that “a fresh ray of light and peace” transfused the soul of her beloved husband.

That such were the facts and that the appearance of her husband was not mere hallucination, Lady Burton stiffly maintained until her dying day.  She told Mr. T. Douglas Murray[FN#655] that she dared not mention the appearances of her husband in her letter to The Morning Post[FN#656] or to her relatives for fear of ridicule.  Yet in the Life of her husband—­almost the closing words—­she does give a hint to those who could understand.  She says:  “Do not be so hard and prosaic as to suppose that our dead cannot, in rare instances, come back and tell us how it is with them."[FN#657]