I was almost unconscious until then that I had really taken away the dagger in my hand. This speech of Rebecca's nearly killed me. They were the first words I had heard connecting me distinctly with that ghastly scene. She described it, and repeated her question. "Where is it?" I asked. "Mr. Carmel took it away with him," she replied, "the same night." "Mr. Carmel?" I repeated, remembering with a new terror his connexion with Monsieur Droqville. "You had no business to allow him to see it, much less--good Heaven!--to take it." I stood up in my terror, but I was too weak, and stumbled back into the chair. I would answer no question of hers. She saw that she was agitating me, and desisted. The whole scene in the jeweller's shop remained emblazoned in vivid tints and lights on my memory. But there was something more, and that perhaps the most terrible ingredient in it. I had recognised another face besides Droqville's. It started between me and the wounded man as I recoiled from my own blow. One hand was extended towards me, to prevent my repeating the stroke--the other held up the wounded man. Sometimes I doubted whether the whole of that frightful episode was not an illusion. Sometimes it seemed only that the pale face, so much younger and handsomer than Monsieur Droqville's--the fiery eyes, the frown, the scarred forehead, the suspended smile that had for only that dreadful moment started into light before me so close to my face, were those of a spectre. The young man who had been turning over the jewels at the counter, and who had offered to give me change for my imaginary sovereign, was the very man I had seen shipwrecked at Malory; the man who had in the wood near Plas Ylwd fought that secret duel; and who had afterwards made, with so reckless an audacity, those mad declarations of love to me; the man who, for a time, had so haunted my imagination, and respecting whom I had received warnings so dark and formidable. Nothing could be more vivid than this picture, nothing more uncertain than its reality. I did not see recognition in the face; all was so instantaneous. Well, I cared not. I was dying. What was the world to me? I had assigned myself to death; and I was willing to accept that fate rather than re-ascend to my frightful life.