te and whole; through no empty sockets
crept the vermin, and their sucking lips were still moist with a little
blood."

Ernest was carried away in spite of himself by her account, which
vividly resembled his own experience. Still he would not give in.

"All this is impressive. I admit it is very impressive. But you yourself
speak of such stories as legends. They are unfounded upon any tangible
fact, and you cannot expect a man schooled in modern sciences to admit,
as having any possible bearing upon his life, the crude belief of the
Middle Ages!"

"Why not?" she responded. "Our scientists have proved true the wildest
theories of mediaeval scholars. The transmutation of metals seems to-day
no longer an idle speculation, and radium has transformed into potential
reality the dream of perpetual motion. The fundamental notions of
mathematics are being undermined. One school of philosophers claims that
the number of angles in a triangle is equal to more than two right
angles; another propounds that it is less. Even great scientists who
have studied the soul of nature are turning to spiritism. The world is
overcoming the shallow scepticism of the nineteenth century. Life has
become once more wonderful and very mysterious. But it also seems that,
with the miracles of the old days, their terrors, their nightmares and
their monsters have come back in a modern guise."

Ernest became even more thoughtful. "Yes," he observed, "there is
something in what you say." Then, pacing the room nervously, he
exclaimed: "And still I find it impossible to believe your explanation.
Reginald a vampire! It seems so ludicrous. If you had told me that such
creatures exist somewhere, far away, I might have discussed the matter;
but in this great city, in the shadow of the Flatiron Building--no!"

She replied with warmth: "Yet they exist--always have existed. Not only
in the Middle Ages, but at all times and in all regions. There is no
nation but has some record of them, in one form or another. And don't
you think if we find a thought, no matter how absurd it may seem to us,
that has ever occupied the minds of men--if we find, I say, such a
perennially recurrent thought, are we not justified in assuming that it
must have some basis in the actual experience of mankind?"

Ernest's brow became very clouded, and infinite numbers of hidden
premature wrinkles began to show. How wan he looked and how frail! He
was as one lost in a labyrinth in which he