realized with every separate brain-cell that I was no longer a victim, the doomed slave of an evil and implacable power, but a free man — free to live, free to love, exempt from the atrocious influences of the nether sphere. I saw that ever since the first encounter in Oxford Street my existence had been under a shadow, dark and malign and always deepening, and that this shadow was now magically dissipated in the exquisite dawn of a new day. And I gave thanks, not only to Fate, but to the divine girl who in one of those inspirations accorded only to genius had conceived the method of my enfranchisement, and so nobly carried it out.

Her eyelids wavered, and she looked at me.

“It is gone?” she murmured.

“Yes,” I said, “the curse is lifted.”