I shall show you later.  I felt the same vague terror which had come to me before and the same sense of some presence.  I turned to wake Jonathan, but found that he slept so soundly that it seemed as if it was he who had taken the sleeping draught, and not I. I tried, but I could not wake him.  This caused me a great fear, and I looked around terrified.  Then indeed, my heart sank within me.  Beside the bed, as if he had stepped out of the mist, or rather as if the mist had turned into his figure, for it had entirely disappeared, stood a tall, thin man, all in black.  I knew him at once from the description of the others.  The waxen face, the high aquiline nose, on which the light fell in a thin white line, the parted red lips, with the sharp white teeth showing between, and the red eyes that I had seemed to see in the sunset on the windows of St. Mary’s Church at Whitby.  I knew, too, the red scar on his forehead where Jonathan had struck him.  For an instant my heart stood still, and I would have screamed out, only that I was paralyzed.  In the pause he spoke in a sort of keen, cutting whisper, pointing as he spoke to Jonathan.

“’Silence!  If you make a sound I shall take him and dash his brains out before your very eyes.’  I was appalled and was too bewildered to do or say anything.  With a mocking smile, he placed one hand upon my shoulder and, holding me tight, bared my throat with the other, saying as he did so, ’First, a little refreshment to reward my exertions.  You may as well be quiet.  It is not the first time, or the second, that your veins have appeased my thirst!’ I was bewildered, and strangely enough, I did not want to hinder him.  I suppose it is a part of the horrible curse that such is, when his touch is on his victim.  And oh, my God, my God, pity me!  He placed his reeking lips upon my throat!” Her husband groaned again.  She clasped his hand harder, and looked at him pityingly, as if he were the injured one, and went on.

“I felt my strength fading away, and I was in a half swoon.  How long this horrible thing lasted I know not, but it seemed that a long time must have passed before he took his foul, awful, sneering mouth away.  I saw it drip with the fresh blood!” The remembrance seemed for a while to overpower her, and she drooped and would have sunk down but for her husband’s sustaining arm.  With a great effort she recovered herself and went on.

“Then he spoke to me mockingly, ’And so you, like the others, would play your brains against mine.  You would help these men to hunt me and frustrate me in my design!  You know now, and they know in part already, and will know in full before long, what it is to cross my path.  They should have kept their energies for use closer to home.  Whilst they played wits against me, against me who commanded nations, and intrigued for them, and fought for them, hundreds of years before they were born, I was countermining them.  And you, their best