With what furious haste I shut the entrance to the vault! with what fierce precaution I locked and doubled-locked it!  Nay, so little did I realize that she was actually dead, that I caught myself saying aloud—­“Safe—­safe at last!  She cannot escape—­I have closed the secret passage—­no one will hear her cries—­she will struggle a little, but it will soon be over—­she will never laugh any more—­never kiss—­never love—­never tell lies for the fooling of men!—­she is buried as I was—­buried alive!”

Muttering thus to myself with a sort of sobbing incoherence, I turned to meet the snarl of the savage blast of the night, with my brain reeling, my limbs weak and trembling—­with the heavens and earth rocking before me like a wild sea—­with the flying moon staring aghast through the driving clouds—­with all the universe, as it were, in a broken and shapeless chaos about me; even so I went forth to meet my fate—­and left her!

*******

Unrecognized, untracked, I departed from Naples.  Wrapped in my cloak, and stretched in a sort of heavy stupor on the deck of the “Rondinella,” my appearance apparently excited no suspicion in the mind of the skipper, old Antonio Bardi, with whom my friend Andrea had made terms for my voyage, little aware of the real identity of the passenger he recommended.

The morning was radiantly beautiful—­the sparkling waves rose high on tiptoe to kiss the still boisterous wind—­the sunlight broke in a wide smile of springtide glory over the world!  With the burden of my agony upon me—­with the utter exhaustion of my overwrought nerves, I beheld all things as in a feverish dream—­the laughing light, the azure ripple of waters—­the receding line of my native shores—­ everything was blurred, indistinct, and unreal to me, though my soul, Argus-eyed, incessantly peered down, down into those darksome depths where she lay, silent forever.  For now I knew she was dead.  Fate had killed her—­not I. All unrepentant as she was, triumphing in her treachery to the last, even in her madness, still I would have saved her, though she strove to murder me.

Yet it was well the stone had fallen—­who knows!—­if she had lived—­ I strove not to think of her, and drawing the key of the vault from my pocket, I let it drop with a sudden splash into the waves.  All was over—­no one pursued me—­no one inquired whither I went.  I arrived at Civita Vecchia unquestioned; from thence I travelled to Leghorn, where I embarked on board a merchant trading vessel bound for South America.  Thus I lost myself to the world; thus I became, as it were, buried alive for the second time.  I am safely sepulchered in these wild woods, and I seek no escape.

Wearing the guise of a rough settler, one who works in common with others, hewing down tough parasites and poisonous undergrowths in order to effect a clearing through these pathless solitudes, none can trace in the strong stern man, with the care-worn face and white hair, any resemblance to the once popular and wealthy Count Oliva, whose disappearance, so strange and sudden, was for a time the talk of all Italy.  For, on one occasion when visiting the nearest town, I saw an article in a newspaper, headed “Mysterious Occurrence in Naples,” and I read every word of it with a sensation of dull amusement.