“To my mind your sister seems to be labouring under the effect of some narcotic.”

“Indeed!”

“Yes; unless she really has lost a quantity of blood, which loss has decreased the heart’s action sufficiently to produce the languor under which she now evidently labours.”

“Oh, that I could believe the former supposition, but I am confident she has taken no narcotic; she could not even do so by mistake, for there is no drug of the sort in the house.  Besides, she is not heedless by any means.  I am quite convinced she has not done so.”

“Then I am fairly puzzled, my young friend, and I can only say that I would freely have given half of what I am worth to see that figure you saw last night.”

“What would you have done?”

“I would not have lost sight of it for the world’s wealth.”

“You would have felt your blood freeze with horror.  The face was terrible.”

“And yet let it lead me where it liked I would have followed it.”

“I wish you had been here.”

“I wish to Heaven I had.  If I though there was the least chance of another visit I would come and wait with patience every night for a month.”

“I cannot say,” replied Henry.  “I am going to sit up to-night with my sister, and I believe, our friend Mr. Marchdale will share my watch with me.”

Mr. Chillingworth appeared to be for a few moments lost in thought, and then suddenly rousing himself, as if he found it either impossible to come to any rational conclusion upon the subject, or had arrived at one which he chose to keep to himself, he said,—­

“Well, well, we must leave the matter at present as it stands.  Time may accomplish something towards its development, but at present so palpable a mystery I never came across, or a matter in which human calculation was so completely foiled.”

“Nor I—­nor I.”

“I will send you some medicines, such as I think will be of service to Flora, and depend upon seeing me by ten o’clock to-morrow morning.”

“You have, of course, heard something,” said Henry to the doctor, as he was pulling on his gloves, “about vampyres.”

“I certainly have, and I understand that in some countries, particularly Norway and Sweden, the superstition is a very common one.”

“And in the Levant.”

“Yes.  The ghouls of the Mahometans are of the same description of beings.  All that I have heard of the European vampyre has made it a being which can be killed, but is restored to life again by the rays of a full moon falling on the body.”

“Yes, yes, I have heard as much.”

“And that the hideous repast of blood has to be taken very frequently, and that if the vampyre gets it not he wastes away, presenting the appearance of one in the last stage of a consumption, and visibly, so to speak, dying.”

“That is what I have understood.”

“To-night, do you know, Mr. Bannerworth, is the full of the moon.”