whom my love had all along
been striving.

'Suicide might sever my soul from hers for ever.' I said, and then
the tragedy would seem too monstrously unjust to be true, and I said:
'It cannot be--such things cannot be: it is a hideous dream. She is
not dead! She is in Wales with friends at Carnarvon, and I shall
awake and laugh at all this imaginary woe!'

And what were now my feelings towards the memory of my father? Can
a man cherish in his heart at one and the same moment scorn of
another man for believing in the efficacy of a curse, and bitter
anger against him for having left a curse behind him? He can! On my
return to London after my illness I had sent back to Wilderspin the
copy of _The Veiled Queen_ he had lent me. But from the library of
Raxton Hall I brought my father's own copy, elaborately bound in the
tooled black calf my father affected. The very sight of that black
binding now irritated me; never did I pass it without experiencing a
sensation that seemed a blending of scorn and fear: scorn of the
ancestral superstitions the book gave voice to: fear of them.

One day I took the book from the shelves and then hurled it across
the room. Stumbling over it some days after this, a spasm of
ungovernable rage came upon me, for terribly was my blood struggling
with Fenella Stanley and Philip Aylwin, and thousands of ancestors,
Romany and Gorgio, who for ages upon ages had been shaping my
destiny. I began to tear out the leaves and throw them on the fire.
But suddenly I perceived the leaves to be covered with marginalia in
my father's manuscript, and with references to Fenella Stanley's
letters--letters which my father seemed to have studied as deeply as
though they were the writings of a great philosopher instead of the
scribblings of an ignorant Gypsy. My eye had caught certain written
words which caused me to clutch at the sheets still burning on the
fire. Too late!--I grasped nothing save a little paper-ash. Then I
turned to the pages still left in my hand, and read these words of my
father's:

'These marginalia are written for the eyes of my dear son, into whose
hands this copy of my book will come. Until he gave me his promise to
bury the amulet with me, I felt alone in the world. But even he
failed to understand what he called "my superstition." He did not
know that by perpetually feeling on my bosom the facets of the
beloved jewel which had long lain warm upon hers--the cross which had
received the la