27 September.—­It was two o’clock before we found a suitable opportunity for our attempt.  The funeral held at noon was all completed, and the last stragglers of the mourners had taken themselves lazily away, when, looking carefully from behind a clump of alder trees, we saw the sexton lock the gate after him.  We knew that we were safe till morning did we desire it, but the Professor told me that we should not want more than an hour at most.  Again I felt that horrid sense of the reality of things, in which any effort of imagination seemed out of place, and I realized distinctly the perils of the law which we were incurring in our unhallowed work.  Besides, I felt it was all so useless.  Outrageous as it was to open a leaden coffin, to see if a woman dead nearly a week were really dead, it now seemed the height of folly to open the tomb again, when we knew, from the evidence of our own eyesight, that the coffin was empty.  I shrugged my shoulders, however, and rested silent, for Van Helsing had a way of going on his own road, no matter who remonstrated.  He took the key, opened the vault, and again courteously motioned me to precede.  The place was not so gruesome as last night, but oh, how unutterably mean looking when the sunshine streamed in.  Van Helsing walked over to Lucy’s coffin, and I followed.  He bent over and again forced back the leaden flange, and a shock of surprise and dismay shot through me.

There lay Lucy, seemingly just as we had seen her the night before her funeral.  She was, if possible, more radiantly beautiful than ever, and I could not believe that she was dead.  The lips were red, nay redder than before, and on the cheeks was a delicate bloom.

“Is this a juggle?” I said to him.

“Are you convinced now?” said the Professor, in response, and as he spoke he put over his hand, and in a way that made me shudder, pulled back the dead lips and showed the white teeth.  “See,” he went on, “they are even sharper than before.  With this and this,” and he touched one of the canine teeth and that below it, “the little children can be bitten.  Are you of belief now, friend John?”

Once more argumentative hostility woke within me.  I could not accept such an overwhelming idea as he suggested.  So, with an attempt to argue of which I was even at the moment ashamed, I said, “She may have been placed here since last night.”

“Indeed?  That is so, and by whom?”

“I do not know.  Someone has done it.”

“And yet she has been dead one week.  Most peoples in that time would not look so.”

I had no answer for this, so was silent.  Van Helsing did not seem to notice my silence.  At any rate, he showed neither chagrin nor triumph.  He was looking intently at the face of the dead woman, raising the eyelids and looking at the eyes, and once more opening the lips and examining the teeth.  Then he turned to me and said,