ecision, can be so unjust? you must
feel that, in all respects, I have been a victim, most gratuitously--a
sufferer, while there existed no just cause that I should suffer; one
who has been tortured, not from personal fault, selfishness, lapse of
integrity, or honourable feelings, but because you have found it
necessary, for the prolongation of your terrific existence, to attack me
as you have done. By what plea of honour, honesty, or justice, can I be
blamed for not embracing an alternative which is beyond all human
control?--I cannot love you."

"Then be content to suffer. Flora Bannerworth, will you not, even for a
time, to save yourself and to save me, become mine?"

"Horrible proposition!"

"Then am I doomed yet, perhaps, for many a cycle of years, to spread
misery and desolation around me; and yet I love you with a feeling which
has in it more of gratefulness and unselfishness than ever yet found a
home within my breast. I would fain have you, although you cannot save
me; there may yet be a chance, which shall enable you to escape from the
persecution of my presence."

"Oh! glorious chance!" said Flora. "Which way can it come? tell me how I
may embrace it, and such grateful feelings as a heart-stricken mourner
can offer to him who has rescued her from her deep affliction, shall yet
be yours."

"Hear me, then, Flora Bannerworth, while I state to you some particulars
of mysterious existence, of such beings as myself, which never yet have
been breathed to mortal ears."

Flora looked intently at him, and listened, while, with a serious
earnestness of manner, he detailed to her something of the physiology of
the singular class of beings which the concurrence of all circumstances
tended to make him appear.

"Flora," he said, "it is not that I am so enamoured of an existence to
be prolonged only by such frightful means, which induces me to become a
terror to you or to others. Believe me, that if my victims, those whom
my insatiable thirst for blood make wretched, suffer much, I, the
vampyre, am not without my moments of unutterable agony. But it is a
mysterious law of our nature, that as the period approaches when the
exhausted energies of life require a new support from the warm, gushing
fountain of another's veins, the strong desire to live grows upon us,
until, in a paroxysm of wild insanity, which will recognise no
obstacles, human or divine, we seek a victim."

"A fearful state!" said Flora.

"It is so;