the object of its desire?" I said,
coming to Maloney's aid, who was finding it more and more difficult to
get words.

"Precisely;--yet the desire of the man remaining utterly unmalefic--pure
and wholesome in every sense--"

"Ah!" I heard the clergyman gasp.

"The lover's desire for union run wild, run savage, tearing its way out
in primitive, untamed fashion, I mean," continued the doctor, striving
to make himself clear to a mind bounded by conventional thought and
knowledge; "for the desire to possess, remember, may easily become
importunate, and, embodied in this animal form of the Subtle Body which
acts as its vehicle, may go forth to tear in pieces all that obstructs,
to reach to the very heart of the loved object and seize it. _Au fond_,
it is nothing more than the aspiration for union, as I said--the
splendid and perfectly clean desire to absorb utterly into itself--"

He paused a moment and looked into Maloney's eyes.

"To bathe in the very heart's blood of the one desired," he added with
grave emphasis.

The fire spurted and crackled and made me start, but Maloney found
relief in a genuine shudder, and I saw him turn his head and look about
him from the sea to the trees. The wind dropped just at that moment and
the doctor's words rang sharply through the stillness.

"Then it might even kill?" stammered the clergyman presently in a hushed
voice, and with a little forced laugh by way of protest that sounded
quite ghastly.

"In the last resort it might kill," repeated Dr. Silence. Then, after
another pause, during which he was clearly debating how much or how
little it was wise to give to his audience, he continued: "And if the
Double does not succeed in getting back to its physical body, that
physical body would wake an imbecile--an idiot--or perhaps never wake at
all."

Maloney sat up and found his tongue.

"You mean that if this fluid animal thing, or whatever it is, should be
prevented getting back, the man might never wake again?" he asked, with
shaking voice.

"He might be dead," replied the other calmly. The tremor of a positive
sensation shivered in the air about us.

"Then isn't that the best way to cure the fool--the brute--?" thundered
the clergyman, half rising to his feet.

"Certainly it would be an easy and undiscoverable form of murder," was
the stern reply, spoken as calmly as though it were a remark about the
weather.

Maloney collapsed visibly, and I gathered the wood over the