k again. As soon as he had locked himself up in his room he strove to
resist it, but in vain. An irresistible force lifted him up and pushed
him against the window, as if to call the phantom, and he saw it at once,
lying first in the spot where the crime was committed in the position in
which it had been found.

Then the dead girl rose up and came toward him with little steps just as
the child had done when she came out of the river. She advanced quietly,
passing straight across the grass and over the bed of withered flowers.
Then she rose up in the air toward Renardet's window. She came toward him
as she had come on the day of the crime. And the man recoiled before the
apparition--he retreated to his bed and sank down upon it, knowing
well that the little one had entered the room and that she now was
standing behind the curtain, which presently moved. And until daybreak he
kept staring at this curtain with a fixed glance, ever waiting to see his
victim depart.

But she did not show herself any more; she remained there behind the
curtain, which quivered tremulously now and then.

And Renardet, his fingers clutching the clothes, squeezed them as he had
squeezed the throat of little Louise Roque.

He heard the clock striking the hours, and in the stillness the pendulum
kept ticking in time with the loud beating of his heart. And he suffered,
the wretched man, more than any man had ever suffered before.

Then, as soon as a white streak of light on the ceiling announced the
approaching day, he felt himself free, alone at last, alone in his room;
and he went to sleep. He slept several hours--a restless, feverish
sleep in which he retraced in dreams the horrible vision of the past
night.

When he went down to the late breakfast he felt exhausted as after
unusual exertion, and he scarcely ate anything, still haunted as he was
by the fear of what he had seen the night before.

He knew well, however, that it was not an apparition, that the dead do
not come back, and that his sick soul, his soul possessed by one thought
alone, by an indelible remembrance, was the only cause of his torture,
was what brought the dead girl back to life and raised her form before
his eyes, on which it was ineffaceably imprinted. But he knew, too, that
there was no cure, that he would never escape from the savage persecution
of his memory, and he resolved to die rather than to endure these
tortures any longer.

Then he thought of how he would