Page:Anna Katharine Green - Leavenworth Case.djvu/192

182 I can see now how the letters I had been writing danced upon the paper before me, appearing to my eyes to take the phantom shapes of persons and things long ago forgotten; crowding my last moments with regrets and dead shames, wild longings, and unspeakable agonies, through all of which that face, the face of my former dream, mingled, pale, sweet, and searching, while closer and closer behind me crept that noiseless foot till I could feel the glaring of the assassin’s eyes across the narrow threshold separating me from death and hear the click of his teeth as he set his lips for the final act. Ah!" and the secretary’s livid face showed the touch of awful horror, "what words can describe such an experience as that? In one moment, all the agonies of hell in the heart and brain, the next a blank through which I seemed to see afar, and as if suddenly removed from all this, a crouching figure looking at its work with starting eyes and pallid back-drawn lips; and seeing, recognize no face that I had ever known, but one so handsome, so remarkable, so unique in its formation and character, that it would be as easy for me to mistake the countenance of my father as the look and figure of the man revealed to me in my dream."

"And this face?" said I, in a voice I failed to recognize as my own.

"Was that of him whom we saw leave Mary Leavenworth’s presence last night and go down the hall to the front door."