“Then be content to suffer.  Flora Bannerworth, will you not, even for a time, to save yourself and to save me, become mine?”

“Horrible proposition!”

“Then am I doomed yet, perhaps, for many a cycle of years, to spread misery and desolation around me; and yet I love you with a feeling which has in it more of gratefulness and unselfishness than ever yet found a home within my breast.  I would fain have you, although you cannot save me; there may yet be a chance, which shall enable you to escape from the persecution of my presence.”

“Oh! glorious chance!” said Flora.  “Which way can it come? tell me how I may embrace it, and such grateful feelings as a heart-stricken mourner can offer to him who has rescued her from her deep affliction, shall yet be yours.”

“Hear me, then, Flora Bannerworth, while I state to you some particulars of mysterious existence, of such beings as myself, which never yet have been breathed to mortal ears.”

Flora looked intently at him, and listened, while, with a serious earnestness of manner, he detailed to her something of the physiology of the singular class of beings which the concurrence of all circumstances tended to make him appear.

“Flora,” he said, “it is not that I am so enamoured of an existence to be prolonged only by such frightful means, which induces me to become a terror to you or to others.  Believe me, that if my victims, those whom my insatiable thirst for blood make wretched, suffer much, I, the vampyre, am not without my moments of unutterable agony.  But it is a mysterious law of our nature, that as the period approaches when the exhausted energies of life require a new support from the warm, gushing fountain of another’s veins, the strong desire to live grows upon us, until, in a paroxysm of wild insanity, which will recognise no obstacles, human or divine, we seek a victim.”

“A fearful state!” said Flora.

“It is so; and, when the dreadful repast is over, then again the pulse beats healthfully, and the wasted energies of a strange kind of vitality are restored to us, we become calm again, but with that calmness comes all the horror, all the agony of reflection, and we suffer far more than tongue can tell.”

“You have my pity,” said Flora; “even you have my pity.”

“I might well demand it, if such a feeling held a place within your breast.  I might well demand your pity, Flora Bannerworth, for never crawled an abject wretch upon the earth’s rotundity, so pitiable as I.”

“Go on, go on.”

“I will, and with such brief conclusions as I may.  Having once attacked any human being, we feel a strange, but terribly impulsive desire again to seek that person for more blood.  But I love you, Flora; the small amount of sensibility that still lingers about my preternatural existence, acknowledges in you a pure and better spirit.  I would fain save you.”

“Oh! tell me how I may escape the terrible infliction.”