“Yes, it begins again,” he whispered. “Her back arches. Her hair bristles. Fright, wavering terrors, move through her subtle veins. Look at her. She sees something. What? God ... me. Her eyes become a burning mirror for the unknown....” He paused as the cat, obeying mysterious impulses, grew tense, its back bristling with inexplicable fears, its little, pointed teeth gleaming behind drawn lips. Standing thus for a moment, it recoiled suddenly from the figure of De Medici and spat. “Ah, Francesca,” he murmured aloud, “my little mirror in which unseen ones spit back at me. He said there was nothing ... nothing. Minor hallucinations. Yes, a reassuring diagnosis. Yet, who knows me? When I know nothing myself, who can see?” He hesitated again and then smiled tiredly at the retreating animal. “Not I, Francesca. No, it was another. I’ve committed no murder. The ghosts that wander inside ... did they escape that night? No, I remember nothing ... nothing like that. It is all dream ... dark dream that embroiders my soul with grewsome and ghostly patterns. Guilty! Yes, I felt guilty. The detective’s eyes. And then Hugo.... The dark dream cringes under memories. But there was no duality. No, it was not I. Yet to others and to myself I act the part of a murderer. I grow furtive. My words became cautious. As if ... yes, as if I were feeling my way through guilty memories. The logic of illusion, nothing else. No demon haunts me. No masked stranger rises evilly and exultantly in my body. No, Francesca, they sleep too deep. They stir too feebly. They throw only shadows ... shadows that mock and frighten my eyes. Hm, shadows whose dim fingers wrestle with my throat. But these shadows are not I.... He was right ... ideas with which I hypnotize myself. An obsession that the past lurks unburied in me.... A curious curse of imagination that sent my father bellowing to his grave. But I have a brain! Do you hear, Francesca? I have a brain. It flashes out like a rapier and decapitates these demons at which you, in your enigmatic ignorance, spit, little cat. Do you see something moving behind the eyes of your master? Illusion, Francesca, it exists not. “Foolish little cat, last of the terrified scientists for whom chimera was reality. You cling to this science of demonology. Your dark and theatrical little soul, Francesca, delights in the quackery of terror. What an immemorial fraud you are! Come closer ... let me look into your Basque eyes. See, nothing. My reason disarms you.” The animal turned and walked slowly from him. At the door, its head twisted back and its eyes glittered for a moment like green and enigmatic questions. Then, with a leap that startled the shadows into motion, it vanished through the doorway.