the world that have been, or that will be, could aid him.  With this one, all the forces of nature that are occult and deep and strong must have worked together in some wonderous way.  The very place, where he have been alive, Undead for all these centuries, is full of strangeness of the geologic and chemical world.  There are deep caverns and fissures that reach none know whither.  There have been volcanoes, some of whose openings still send out waters of strange properties, and gases that kill or make to vivify.  Doubtless, there is something magnetic or electric in some of these combinations of occult forces which work for physical life in strange way, and in himself were from the first some great qualities.  In a hard and warlike time he was celebrate that he have more iron nerve, more subtle brain, more braver heart, than any man.  In him some vital principle have in strange way found their utmost.  And as his body keep strong and grow and thrive, so his brain grow too.  All this without that diabolic aid which is surely to him.  For it have to yield to the powers that come from, and are, symbolic of good.  And now this is what he is to us.  He have infect you, oh forgive me, my dear, that I must say such, but it is for good of you that I speak.  He infect you in such wise, that even if he do no more, you have only to live, to live in your own old, sweet way, and so in time, death, which is of man’s common lot and with God’s sanction, shall make you like to him.  This must not be!  We have sworn together that it must not.  Thus are we ministers of God’s own wish.  That the world, and men for whom His Son die, will not be given over to monsters, whose very existence would defame Him.  He have allowed us to redeem one soul already, and we go out as the old knights of the Cross to redeem more.  Like them we shall travel towards the sunrise.  And like them, if we fall, we fall in good cause.”

He paused and I said, “But will not the Count take his rebuff wisely?  Since he has been driven from England, will he not avoid it, as a tiger does the village from which he has been hunted?”

“Aha!” he said, “your simile of the tiger good, for me, and I shall adopt him.  Your maneater, as they of India call the tiger who has once tasted blood of the human, care no more for the other prey, but prowl unceasing till he get him.  This that we hunt from our village is a tiger, too, a maneater, and he never cease to prowl.  Nay, in himself he is not one to retire and stay afar.  In his life, his living life, he go over the Turkey frontier and attack his enemy on his own ground.  He be beaten back, but did he stay?  No!  He come again, and again, and again.  Look at his persistence and endurance.  With the child-brain that was to him he have long since conceive the idea of coming to a great city.  What does he do?  He find out the place of all the world most of promise for him.  Then he deliberately set himself down