“Then we throw them away?” Ethel asked, pale, but dry-eyed.  A shudder passed through her body and she clinched her glass nervously.  At that moment Reginald resembled a veritable Prince of Darkness, sinister and beautiful, painted by the hand of a modern master.  Then, for a space, he again became the man of the world.  Smiling and self-possessed, he filled the glasses, took a long sip of the wine and resumed his narrative.

“That boy was followed by others.  I absorbed many useless things and some that were evil.  I realised that I must direct my absorptive propensities.  This I did.  I selected, selected well.  And all the time the terrible power of which I was only half conscious grew within me.”

“It is indeed a terrible power,” she cried; “all the more terrible for its subtlety.  Had I not myself been its victim, I should not now find it possible to believe in it.”

“The invisible hand that smites in the dark is certainly more fearful than a visible foe.  It is also more merciful.  Think how much you would have suffered had you been conscious of your loss.”

“Still it seems even now to me that it cannot have been an utter, irreparable loss.  There is no action without reaction.  Even I—­even we—­must have received from you some compensation for what you have taken away.”

“In the ordinary processes of life the law of action and reaction is indeed potent.  But no law is without exception.  Think of radium, for instance, with its constant and seemingly inexhaustible outflow of energy.  It is a difficult thing to imagine, but our scientific men have accepted it as a fact.  Why should we find it more difficult to conceive of a tremendous and infinite absorptive element?  I feel sure that it must somewhere exist.  But every phenomenon in the physical world finds its counterpart in the psychical universe.  There are radium-souls that radiate without loss of energy, but also without increase.  And there are souls, the reverse of radium, with unlimited absorptive capacities.”

“Vampire-souls,” she observed, with a shudder, and her face blanched.

“No,” he said, “don’t say that.”  And then he suddenly seemed to grow in stature.  His face was ablaze, like the face of a god.

“In every age,” he replied, with solemnity, “there are giants who attain to a greatness which by natural growth no men could ever have reached.  But in their youth a vision came to them, which they set out to seek.  They take the stones of fancy to build them a palace in the kingdom of truth, projecting into reality dreams, monstrous and impossible.  Often they fail and, tumbling from their airy heights, end a quixotic career.  Some succeed.  They are the chosen.  Carpenter’s sons they are, who have laid down the Law of a World for milleniums to come; or simple Corsicans, before whose eagle eye have quaked the kingdoms of the earth.  But to accomplish their mission they need a will of iron and