rds after me--

"WHERE IS HE? WHERE IS HE?"

"Ay!" and my voice rang out through the hollow vault, its passion
restrained no more. "WHERE IS HE?--the poor fool, the miserable,
credulous dupe, whose treacherous wife played the courtesan under his
very roof, while he loved and blindly trusted her? WHERE IS HE? Here,
here!" and I seized her hands and forced her up from her kneeling
posture. "I promised you should see me as I am! I swore to grow young
to-night for your sake!--Now I keep my word! Look at me, Nina!--look at
me, my twice-wedded wife!--Look at me!--do you not know your HUSBAND?"

And throwing my dark habiliments from me, I stood before her
undisguised! As though some defacing disease had swept over her at my
words and look, so her beauty suddenly vanished. Her face became drawn
and pinched and almost old--her lips turned blue, her eyes grew glazed,
and strained themselves from their sockets to stare at me; her very
hands looked thin and ghost-like as she raised them upward with a
frantic appealing gesture; there was a sort of gasping rattle in her
throat as she drew herself away from me with a convulsive gesture of
aversion, and crouched on the floor as though she sought to sink
through it and thus avoid my gaze.

"Oh, no, no, no!" she moaned, wildly, "not Fabio!--no, it cannot
be=-Fabio is dead--dead! And you!--you are mad!--this is some cruel
jest of yours--some trick to frighten me!"

She broke off breathlessly, and her large, terrified eyes wandered to
mine again with a reluctant and awful wonder. She attempted to arise
from her crouching position; I approached, and assisted her to do so
with ceremonious politeness. She trembled violently at my touch, and
slowly staggering to her feet, she pushed back her hair from her
forehead and regarded me fixedly with a searching, anguished look,
first of doubt, then of dread, and lastly of convinced and hopeless
certainty, for she suddenly covered her eyes with her hands as though
to shut out some repulsive object and broke into a low wailing sound
like that of one in bitter physical pain. I laughed scornfully.

"Well, do you know me at last?" I cried. "'Tis true I have somewhat
altered. This hair of mine was black, if you remember--it is white
enough now, blanched by the horrors of a living death such as you
cannot imagine, but which," and I spoke more slowly and impressively,
"you may possibly experience ere long. Yet in spite of this change I
think you know