The Fate of a Crown by L. Frank Baum

"Compose yourself, my dear Robert," said Dom Miguel, pressing my hands in both his own. "It is no ghost you see, for-thanks be to God! -I am still alive."

I had no words to answer him. In all my speculations as to the result of Madam Izabel's terrible deed, the fate of the records and the mysterious opening of the vault without its key, I never had conceived the idea that Dom Miguel might have escaped his doom. And to find him here, not only alive, but apparently in good health and still busy with the affairs of the Revolution, conveyed so vivid a shock to my nerves that I could but dumbly stare into my old friend's kind eyes and try to imagine that I beheld a reality and not the vision of a disordered brain.