Daughter of the Moonlight

Seabury Quinn | 1930 | Illinois

The annual midsummer ladies' night at the Kobbskill Country Club proved a pretty party. The white walls of the clubhouse, reared in the severe style of architecture affected by the early Dutch settlers, shone like an illuminated monument in the dusky blue of the July night, lights blazed at every window, and colored bulbs decorated the overhanging roofs of the broad piazzas which stretched along the front and rear of the building. The artistically parked grounds near the house shone with Chinese lanterns which gleamed with rose, blue, violet, gold and jade, rivaling the brilliance of the summer stars. Jazz blared in the commodious ballroom and echoed from the big, yellow-and-red-striped marquee set up by the first green. Brilliant as the plumage of birds of paradise, the light silken dresses of the women made bright highlights in the night, while the somber black and white of their escorts' costumes furnished a pleasing contrast and made the chiaroscuro of color the more vivid. Three of us — Jules de Grandin, our host, Colonel Patrick FitzPatrick, and I — sat on the front veranda and rocked comfortably in wide wicker chairs, the ice in our tall glasses tinkling pleasantly.

"Mordieu, mes amis," the little Frenchman exclaimed enthusiastically, sucking appreciatively from the twin straws in his long glass, "c'est une scene tres charmante! It is so — how do you say? — so — ah, mort de ma vie, les belles creatures!" His gaze rested on a pair of girls who paused momentarily beneath the luminous drops of the crystal chandelier hanging from the porch roof at the head of the stairs.

Limned in vivid silhouette against the background of smalt-blue sky and black-green evergreens, the girls were oddly alike, yet curiously unlike. Both were gowned in green, tall and slender with the modernly fleshless figure which simulates boyishness more than femininity; both had small, clear-carved features; both wore their hair cut close at the back, rather long and prettily waved at the front; both possessed complexions of milky whiteness, but one was yellow-haired and violet-eyed, while the short-shorn locks of the other were red as rose-gold alloyed with copper, and her eyes, long, black-fringed and obliquing slightly downward at their outer corners, were green as moss-agate.

"Parbleu," the Frenchman swore delightedly, "they are like a boutonniere — she of the golden hair is like an asphodele — a slender daffodil that sways and dances in the evening breeze; while she of the ruddy tresses, morbleu, she is a poppy, a glorious, glowing-red poppy to steal men's senses away, no less!"

"Humph," Colonel FitzPatrick returned, "you're nearer right than you think, old-timer. She's all of that, and then some."

"Ah, you know her?" de Grandin asked with interest.

"Ought to," FitzPatrick laughed. "The yellow-haired one's my daughter Josephine; the other's my niece, Dolores. She's lived with us since she was a kid of ten, and a queer lot she is, too."

"But certainly," the Frenchman agreed with a vigorous nod, "one with hair and eyes like hers could be no ordinary mortal. She is a fee, a pixy out of some story-book, a —"

"I'm not so sure of that," the other interrupted with a chuckle. "Sometimes I've thought her an imp out of quite a different place. She's been off to school — so has Josephine — for the past two years; but unless she's changed a lot, some one's in for a bad time before she goes back."

He paused a moment, drawing thoughtfully at his cigar, then: "They say Cleopatra and Helen of Troy, not to mention Helen of Tyre, had hair of that odd, metallic red; I'm inclined to credit the legends. Dolores is the sort who'd go to any lengths for a thrill. I can imagine her on the throne of an Eastern despot administering poison to her unsuspecting lovers just to see 'em squirm as they died, and having a few dozen assorted captives disemboweled to find out what made 'em tick. Pity, or even decent consideration for others' feelings just don't exist when her curiosity or convenience are concerned."

The girls seemed engaged in some sort of argument; the red-haired one striving to interest the blond in some plan, the yellow-haired girl stubbornly refusing. At length, with a shrug betraying mingled annoyance and resignation, the blond girl gave in, and they passed toward the dancing marquee arm in arm.

"There you are," FitzPatrick grumbled, "never knew it to fail; Josephine's got plenty of will of her own where I'm concerned — where any one else is, for that matter — but Dolores can twist her round her finger any time she wishes."

We rocked, smoked and cooled ourselves with repeated orders from the club steward's stock, played several rubbers of bridge, then returned to the porch for refreshments. By two o'clock the cars began leaving the parking-lot, and by a quarter of three the house and grounds were all but deserted.

"Confound it," Colonel FitzPatrick grumbled, "where the deuce are those hare-brained girls? Don't they know I'd like to be home by daylight?"

Interrogation of several homeward-bound couples failed to elicit information concerning the girls' whereabouts, and our host at last lost his temper. "Let's go round 'em up," he proposed. "I'm betting we'll find 'em lallygagging with a pair of shiny-haired sheiks in one of those fool summer-houses!"

However well the Colonel knew his women-folk, his prediction proved at least half-way wrong before we had walked a hundred yards from the clubhouse. From a shaded bower of honeysuckle, ideally adapted for the exchange of youthful vows of undying affection, the sound of a woman sobbing piteously attracted our attention; as we approached, the green gown and crocus-yellow hair of Josephine FitzPatrick told us half our quest was over.

"Why, Jo, what's the matter?" Colonel FitzPatrick asked as he paused beside his daughter. His assumed bruskness evaporated as he saw her abject misery, and real concern was in his voice as he continued: "Here all alone? Where's Martin? I thought I saw him here tonight."

"He was — he is — oh, I don't know where he is!" the girl returned with the inconsistency of overmastering grief, "He's somewhere with Dolores, and — oh, I wish I were dead!"

"There, daughter, there," FitzPatrick patted the girl's gleaming bare shoulder with awkward tenderness, "tell Dad about it. It can't be so very bad. Why, only last week Martin asked me for you, and —"

"That's just it," the girl interrupted with a high, half-hysterical wail. "Dolores knew he wanted me and I wanted him — she didn't want him, really; she just wanted to take him from me to show she could do it. It's always been so, Daddy. When we were little girls she always took the doll I loved the most, and broke it when she tired of it. She beat me for honors at school when she heard I was out for the history prize; I never had a beau she didn't take away from me; now she's taken Martin, and — oh, Dad, I never wanted anything in all my life as I want him. Make her give him back! She'll take him as she took my dolls, and — and she'll break him when she tires of him, too; she'll never, never give him back to me. Oh, I hate her, I hate her!"

"Now, Jo —" her father began awkwardly, but:

"I know what you're going to say!" she blazed. "You're going to tell me she's an orphan, hasn't any one to love or care for her but us, and I must give in to her — give her everything I prize most, because her father and mother are dead! She got away with everything I wanted most on those grounds when we were children; but she shan't have Martin, I tell you; she shan't! I love him and I want him, and I won't let her have him. I'll kill her first!"

"Go get your things," FitzPatrick interrupted authoritatively. "I'll bring Dolores in — and Martin, too." He turned away with a stern, set face and tramped purposefully toward the deeper shadow of the evergreen grove.

"Everything she says is true," he confided as we marched along. "Dolores came to us when her parents were killed in a railway accident in Virginia. She was only ten then, and was the sole survivor of the wreck. Her father was my younger brother; her mother — humph, well, none of us knew much of her. Jim met her down South somewhere while he was heading a surveying crew. Wrote us all sorts of glowing letters about her, but I never met her — Dad absolutely forbade the match, you see, and when they were married in spite of him, refused to see either of them. Jim got it in his head I was opposed to it, too; so when Father died and cut him out of his will, he'd have nothing to do with me, wouldn't even answer my letters when I wrote and offered to share the estate half and half with him. Then he and Giatanas were killed, and I took Dolores to live with us. She's co-legatee in my will with Josephine, and I've tried to be a father to her, but — well, there have been times when I thought I'd underwritten too big an issue."

"Giatanas," de Grandin repeated softly. "An odd name for an American woman, is it not, Monsieur? What was her surname, if you recall?"

"She didn't have any, as far as I know," FitzPatrick returned. "That's where the difficulties arose. She wasn't an American. She was a Spanish Gipsy, the seventh daughter of the queen of the tribe, who claimed to be a seeress, and all that sort of tosh. Jim met her when his crew came on their camp, and simply went blotto over her at first glance. I don't know much about the Gipsies, but I've been told they're not Christians. At any rate, Giatanas and he were married by the tribal rite, not by a clergyman, and I suppose their marriage wasn't absolutely legal, but —"

A crashing, as of some heavy-footed animal, sounded in the undergrowth of a near-by pine copse.

"Who — what the devil's that?" Colonel FitzPatrick demanded, striding belligerently toward the disturbance. "Come out o' that, whoever you are, or I'll come in after you. Now, then, come on — good God, look!"

Parting the long-needled branches with blind, groping hands, a young man in evening dress stumbled and staggered into the pool of luminance shed by a Chinese lantern. His collar and tie were undone, his shirt broken loose from its studs, his clothing in utter disarray. Blood streamed over his chin in a steady spate, staining his linen and dripping on the pine needles at his feet. At first I thought his lips parted in a drunken grin, but as he reeled nearer I gave an exclamation of horror. The grimace I had thought voluntary resulted from dreadful mutilation. Where the scarf-skin and mucous membrane joined, his lips had been cut away in two semicircular sections, like a pair of parentheses laid horizontally, revealing the white, staring teeth beneath and drenching his chin and breast with a spilth of ruby blood.

"Martin, boy, whatever is the matter — how did it happen?" FitzPatrick asked in a shrill, half-unbelieving whisper.

The young man gave a slavering, unintelligible answer, waving his arms wildly toward the clearing behind as his mutilated lips refused to form the words, and goggling at us with rolling, horrified eyes. His impotence and fright, his inability to speak and the wondering horror in his dazed eyes sickened me. It was like witnessing the agony of some gentle, dumb animal, tortured where it had thought to find kindness.

"Quick, Friend Trowbridge," de Grandin cried as he snatched the handkerchief from his breast pocket and deftly folded it into a pack for the boy's maimed mouth, "help me get him to the house; we must take immediate measures, for his coronary vessels are cut — his hemorrhage is dangerous. Let Monsieur FitzPatrick seek his niece, here is work for us!"

While we clawed through the meager supplies of the club's first-aid kit an attendant telephoned Harrisonville for an ambulance and reported that the big emergency car which Coroner Martin, in his private capacity of funeral director, kept available for service, was already on its way, for the city hospitals resolutely refused to send their cars beyond the limits of the municipality.

"Dieu de Dieu," the Frenchman swore feverishly, "if we could but obtain a styptic, we might make progress, but this gauze, this adhesive tape, these prepared bandages — what use are they? On the field of battle, yes; in such a case as this, where we must ever consider the coming operation which is to restore the young monsieur's countenance, non. Ah, parbleu, I have it! Quick, Friend Trowbridge, rush, run, hasten, fly to the so excellent chef and obtain from him some gelatin and a pan of boiling-hot water. Yes, that will do most nobly, I apprehend."

Working quickly, he made a paste of the gelatin and water, then applied the transparent mixture to young Faber's torn lips. To my surprise it acted almost as well as collodion, and in a few minutes the entire flow of blood was staunched. We had hardly finished when Martin's ambulance drew up before the door, its powerful eight-cylinder engine panting like a live thing with the strain to which it had been put in making the ten-mile run. Assisted by the genial mortician, who had dropped his other work to superintend the emergency trip, we bundled the injured man into a chair-cot and bore him to the car.

"Mon Dieu, my hat!" de Grandin wailed as I was about to leap into the ambulance and slam the door. "Quick, my friend, get it for me, if you please — it cost me fifty francs!"

I hustled to the check room to retrieve the missing headgear, and as I hurried out again I caught a glimpse of Josephine and Dolores FitzPatrick awaiting the colonel and his car.

Josephine, tear-scarred and tremulous, had evidently been upbraiding her cousin in no uncertain terms, but the red-haired maiden was calm beneath the reproaches.

"Martin?" I heard her exclaim in a cool, ironical voice. "Why, Jo, dear, I don't want him; you're welcome to him, I'm sure."

Something like a draft of winter air piercing through the sultry summer night seemed to chill my spine as I listened. Was it just a crack-brained fancy that made me think her thin, red lips were colored with a smear less innocent than any brand of rouge obtainable at drug stores?

The carelessness of a local fish-dealer in failing to provide adequate refrigeration for his finny stock occasioned a young epidemic of mild ptomaine poisonings, and I was kept busy prescribing Rochelle salt and administering hypodermic doses of morphine throughout the following day. By dinnertime I was in a state bordering on collapse, but Jules de Grandin was fresh as the newly starched linen he had donned for the evening meal.

"What have you been up to?" I asked as we enjoyed our coffee on the side veranda.

"Eh bien, three stories; no less," he answered with a chuckle.

"What?"

"Three stories, I did say," he returned. "Upon the third floor of Mercy Hospital, with the young Monsieur Faber. Jules de Grandin is clever. The wounds upon the young monsieur's face already make excellent progress, there is no infection, and all is prepared for me to graft flesh from his leg upon his mangled lips. When I have done, only a little, so small mustache will be needed to hide his scars from the world. Yes, it is an altogether satisfactory case."

"How the deuce did he receive that appalling hurt?" I wondered. "It looked almost as though some ferocious beast had worried him. But that's absurd, of course. There isn't any game more savage than a rabbit to be found in this section of Jersey."

"U'm," de Grandin sipped a mouthful of coffee slowly and beat a devil's tattoo on the arm of his chair with small, slender fingers. "One wonders."

"This one doesn't — not tonight, at any rate," I answered. "I'm too tired to think. It's been a hard day, and tomorrow looks like another; I'll turn in, if you don't mind."

"Happy dreams," he bade with a wave of his hand as I rose to go inside.

Perhaps it was the salad I had eaten, perhaps the broiling heat of the July night which made me so thirsty; at any rate, I woke with parched tongue and paper-dry lips some time between midnight and dawn and reached sleepily for the carafe of chilled water on my bedside table. I upturned the chromium-plated bottle, but no cooling trickle of liquid reached my glass. "Hang it!" I muttered as I sought my slippers and started for the bathroom to replenish the exhausted water supply.

"Dieu, non; I shall make no treaty with such as you!" I heard de Grandin whisper as I shuffled past his door on my return trip. "Away, hell-spawn, I enter no engagements —"

I paused before his door, wondering whether it were better to waken him or let his nightmare pass, when a further sound came from beyond the panels — a queer, baffling sound, like something scratching and clawing at the stout copper screen at the window. I hesitated no longer.

"Good Lord!" I exclaimed as I entered the bedroom. Jules de Grandin lay on his bed, his limbs taut and rigid, his fingers clutching at the linen. Beyond the screen, clawing at the copper mesh with the fury of a savage beast, was the biggest owl I had ever seen. With beak and talons it fought the woven wire, and in its glowing, yellow eyes there blazed a steady glare of concentrated malignancy and hatred.

A moment I stared at the uncanny thing, completely taken aback; then, acting without conscious thought, I hurried to the window and dashed the contents of my water-bottle full in its evil face. "Be off!" I ordered sharply. The visitant's fiery eyes disappeared as though they had been two glowing coals extinguished by the flood of water, and with a scream of mingled rage and fright it flapped away in the surrounding shadows.

"Cordieu!" de Grandin woke with a start and sat bolt-upright. "I have had a most exceedingly evil dream, Friend Trowbridge. I dreamed a mighty owl, well-nigh as great as Uncle Sam's so glorious eagle, came clawing at the window, and bade me keep darkly secret a fact I discovered today. I refused its order, and it made at me with beak and claws, as if it were a devil-bird from hell's own subcellar!"

"H'm, the devil part of it was probably a dream," I answered, "but the owl was certainly real enough. The biggest one I ever saw was scratching at the screen like a thing possessed when I came down the hall a moment ago. I thought —"

"Ha, do you tell me? And where is it now?" he interrupted.

"Drying itself, I imagine."

"You mean —"

"I didn't know what else to do to discourage it, so I flung a quart or so of water on it."

"Oh, Trowbridge, my good, my incomparable Trowbridge!" he applauded. "You know not what you do; but always you do the right thing. Did you also address it?"

"Yes," I grinned sheepishly. "I said, 'Be off!'"

"Mort d'un rat mort!" he cried, leaping from the bed and flinging both arms about me. "You are priceless, my old one. You are perfection's own self, no less!"

"What the deuce —"

"You did perfectly. If it were a physical, natural bird, which I greatly doubt, the dousing you gave it was enough to discourage its ardor, beyond dispute; if it were what I damnation suspect, the baptism and your unequivocal command to take itself elsewhere were precisely what was required to rid us of its presence. Oh, my inestimable one, if I could be as sure of myself in my wisdom as you are in your ignorance, I should esteem Jules de Grandin more highly."

"Thank heaven you aren't, then," I countered with a laugh. "You're bad enough as it is; if you admired yourself any more there'd be no living with you!"

"Bete!" he cried. "I have killed for less than that; the least I should do is challenge you to mortal combat and —"

"Confound it!" I interrupted. "And at this unholy hour, too!" My bedroom telephone had commenced ringing with all the infernal insistence of which those instruments of torture are capable when we are blissfully asleep.

"Hullo, Dr. Trowbridge," came the challenge over the wire; "FitzPatrick speaking. Can you come over at once? It's Dolores — she's gone!"

"Gone?" I echoed. "Why, how do you mean? Have you notified the police —"

"Hell's fire, no! This is a case for a physician. She had some sort of seizure this afternoon and —"

"All right," I broke in, "we'll be right out."

Ten minutes later de Grandin and I were speeding toward Seven Pines, FitzPatrick's palatial country seat.

The place was in a turmoil when we reached it. Lights blazed in the windows from top to bottom; the colonel, his daughter and the servants trod on each other's heels in aimless circling quests for the missing girl; everywhere was bustle, confusion and futility.

"Hanged if I know what it was," the colonel confessed as we shook hands. "Dolores had been acting queerly ever since last night when young Faber was injured. By the way, how is he, Doctor de Grandin?"

"Excellent, all things considered," the Frenchman replied. "But it is of Mademoiselle Dolores we were speaking. What of her?"

"Well, after we found Martin Faber last night I beat my way through the pines to look for her, and found her stretched out on the ground, unconscious. It gave me a shock — I thought she might be dead or injured, but just as I stooped to pick her up she came round, rose without assistance and walked to the house with me as coolly as though falling in a faint was an every-night occurrence with her."

"Tiens, and was it?" de Grandin asked.

"Not that I know," FitzPatrick answered shortly. "I asked her if she'd seen Martin, and she said she had.

"'Was he all right?' I wanted to know, and;

"'As right as usual — he's always something of an ass, isn't he, Uncle Pat?' she answered.

"'Perhaps you'd be interested if I told you he's been terribly hurt, had both lips almost torn off,' I snapped.

"'Perhaps I should, but I'm not,' she replied as cool as you please, and that's all I got from her.

"'You're inhuman!' I accused.

"'So I've been told,' she admitted.

"After that we didn't speak till we reached the clubhouse.

"I think she and Josephine had a pretty warm set-to later, for both of 'em seemed rather huffy when we drove home, and Dolores began acting queerly this morning."

"How, by example?" de Grandin asked.

"Oh, she seemed unduly depressed, even for one of her moody temperament, wouldn't eat anything, and seemed not to hear when any one spoke to her. Just before dinner she was sitting on the porch, looking down the lawn, but not seeming to see anything, when all of a sudden I noticed her left foot was twitching and shaking like —" He paused for an adequate illustration, then: "As though a galvanic current had been applied to it.

"I looked at her, wondering what the matter was, and within a moment the spasm seemed to spread all over her. She'd shake as though with a chill, then seem to relax, go limp as a damp cloth, then tremble more violently than ever. Before I could reach her she'd slipped from her chair to the floor and lay there, twitching and trembling like a mechanical figure when the clockwork is almost run down. Her eyes were partly opened, but the eyeballs were turned up under the upper lids so the pupils were invisible. She seemed wholly unconscious when I picked her up."

"Great heavens!" I exclaimed, "that has all the earmarks of an epilep —"

"Zut!" de Grandin cut me short. "What happened further, if you please, Monsieur?"

"That's all. We put her to bed, and she seemed to lapse into a natural sleep. I hadn't planned on calling you until tomorrow morning; but a few minutes ago when Josephine went in to see how she was, we found she'd gone. We've searched everywhere, but she seems to have evaporated. If we'd only thought to have somebody stay with her, we might —"

"Pardon me, sir," FitzPatrick's chauffeur suggested, pausing respectfully by his employer's elbow, "I've been thinking Bruno might be able to help us here; he's a hunter, and his scent is keen, even if he hasn't been trained to track people."

"Nonsense —" the colonel began, but:

"Excellent, my old one, your idea is entirely sound," de Grandin applauded. "Obtain from Mademoiselle's wardrobe a pair of shoes, and let the dog smell them thoroughly. Then, by happy chance, if the others have not already obscured her tracks with their fruitless searchings, we may be led to her."

The dog, a long-legged, rangy hound, was brought from the stable, given the scent from a pair of Dolores' bedroom mules, and led out by the chauffeur. Slowly the man and beast walked round the house in ever-widening circles. The hound's nose was to the ground most of the time, but every now and then he would raise his muzzle and sniff the upper air as though to clear his nostrils of a confusing medley of scents. They had almost completed their twelfth circuit when the dog abruptly jerked forward against his leash, thrust his muzzle forward and gave a deep, belling bay. Next instant, dragging himself free, he set out toward a rise of ground behind FitzPatrick's grove, his gray-and-brown body extended, shoulders and hind-quarters moving rhythmically as he galloped.

"After him, Friend Trowbridge!" de Grandin cried. "He has the scent, he will assuredly take us to her."

Stumbling, scrambling over the uneven ground of the wood, we followed the dog, entered the deeper shadow of the grove, then paused irresolute, for all trace of our canine guide had vanished.

"Sacre bleu," de Grandin swore, "we are at fault. Here, mon brave, here, noble animal!" He put his fingers to his lips and sounded a shrill whistle.

Answer was almost immediate. From the farther side of the wood the hound came slinking, his ears and muzzle drooping, tail tucked pitifully between his legs. Like a frightened child the beast cowered by de Grandin's legs and whimpered in abject terror.

"Huh," exclaimed the chauffeur, "th' fool dawg's lost th' scent!"

The little Frenchman slipped his finger under the animal's collar and advanced slowly toward the clearing beyond. "What lies yonder?" he asked, turning to the chauffeur.

"Th' ol' graveyard," returned the other. "Colonel FitzPatrick tried to buy it when he took over th' estate, but th' heirs wouldn't sell. Our land stops at th' boundary o' th' woods, sir."

"Eh, do you tell me?" de Grandin answered absently, patting the whimpering hound's back gently. "It may well be our good beast has found the trail only too well, and returned to us for reasons of prudence, mon ami. Look, what is that?" He pointed upward.

Clear-cut against the faint luminosity of the summer sky, a great, black-winged bird went sailing on outstretched, almost motionless pinions, circled slowly a moment, then swooped downward to the fenced-in close of the old, dismantled burying-ground which lay before us. Almost at once another spectral shape, and still another, followed the first in ghostly single file.

"H'm, they look like owls to me," the chauffeur returned, "but they're bigger than any owls I ever seen. Jimminy crickets, there's three of 'em! Never seen nothin' like it before."

"Let us hope you may not do so again," the little Frenchman answered. "Come, let us go."

"Not quittin', are yuh?" the chauffeur asked, half contemptuously.

The Frenchman made no reply as, the hound's collar still clutched in his hand, he strode toward the house.

Once inside the lighted hall, he swept the circle of servants with an appraising eye. "Is there a Catholic present?" he demanded.

"Sure, I'm one," volunteered the cook, on whose countenance appeared the map of County Kerry. "Wot ov it?"

"Very good. Will you be good enough to lend me your rosary, and a flask of holy water, as well, if you happen to possess it?" he returned.

"Sure, ye can have 'em, an' welcome," she answered, "but what ye're afther wantin' ov 'em is more'n I can see."

Two steps carried de Grandin to her side. "What is today, Madame?" he asked, staring her levelly in the eye.

"Why, sure, an' it's July thirty-first — no, 'tis August first," she answered wonderingly.

"Precisement. In France we call this day la fete de saint Pierre-es-Liens. You know it as the feast of Saint Peter's Chains, or —"

"Glory be to God! 'Tis Lammas!" she cried, terrified understanding shining in her face. "Wuz it fer this th' pore young gur-rl wuz stole aw-ay?"

"I would not go so far," de Grandin answered, "but a moment since the hound came whimpering and trembling to my knee after he had been to the ancient graveyard which lies beyond Monsieur le Colonel's woodland, and we did see three monster owls, with yellow, sulfurous eyes, fly past the moon. May I have the blessed articles?"

"Indade ye shall!" she told him heartily. "An' it's th' brave lad ye are to venture in that haunted place. Faith, Bridget O'Flaherty wouldn't do it if th' Howly Father stood at her elbow, wid th' whole College o' Cardinals behint 'im! Ouch, God an' th' Howly Saints preserve this house tonight!" She signed herself reverently with the cross as she hastened to procure the rosary and blessed water.

Once more we forced our way through FitzPatrick's wood lot. Wrapped about his right wrist de Grandin wore the cook's rosary like a bracelet, in his left hand he bore a half-pint flask adorned with a label assuring the beholder that it contained "Golden Wedding Rye, 50 Years Old, Bottled in Bond," but which actually contained nothing more lawless than water from the font of St. Joseph's church. At the Frenchman's heels I marched, a double-barreled shotgun cocked and ready, that we might be prepared to meet the foe on ghostly or terrestrial planes.

"Careful, Friend Trowbridge," he warned, "we do approach." Stepping cautiously from the shadow of the oak trees, he advanced stealthily toward the tumbledown wooden fence enclosing the disused cemetery.

Almost as we emerged from the wood there came a queer, high, piping sound, a sort of sustained whistle, so shrill as to be almost inaudible, yet so piercing in quality that it stabbed the ear as a dentist's whirling drill bites the tortured tooth. Up, wheeling blindly in ever-widening circles, then pouncing forward like birds of prey came a trio of great, sable bats, squeaking viciously as they swooped at our faces.

"Ha, evil ones, you find us not unprepared!" the little Frenchman whispered between drawn lips. "Behold this sign, ye minions of the dark — look, and be afraid!" He raised his bead-bound wrist, displaying the miniature crucifix which swung from the rosary, and at the same time thrust his left hand forward, sending a shower of holy water toward the flying things.

The bats were larger than any creatures of the kind I had ever seen; in my excitement it seemed to me they were as big as full-grown rats, with wing-spread of a yard or more, and their little, evil eyes glinted with a red and fiery malevolence as they swooped. I raised the gun and loosed both barrels at them, then broke the lock and jammed fresh cartridges feverishly into the smoking breech.

"Hold," de Grandin cried exultingly, "you or I, or both of us, have put them to rout, Friend Trowbridge; see, they are gone!"

They were. Look as I would, I could espy no sign of the uncouth things.

"Why, I must have literally blown them to pieces," I exclaimed.

"U'm, perhaps," he conceded. "Let us see what further we may see."

Dolores FitzPatrick lay supine upon a sunken grave, her head pressed tight against the weather-gnawed tombstone, her feet toward the lower end of the sepulcher. Stretched to utmost length diagonally from her shoulders, her arms extended up and outward, while her nether limbs were thrust out stiffly at acute angles from her hips, making the design of a white St. Andrew's cross upon the mossy graveyard turf. Briars and clutching undergrowth had ripped her flimsy silken nightrobe to tatters so that scarce a shred remained to clothe her; her slippers had been shed somewhere in her flight, and stones and brambles had bruised and torn her tender feet; more than one thorn-gash scarred her slim white body, and a wisp of short, ruddy hair lay across her forehead like a bleeding wound.

"Good heavens!" I cried, dropping to my knees and taking her wrist between my fingers. "She's" — I paused, put my ear to her still breast, then looked up at the Frenchman with dawning horror in my eyes — "she's gone, de Grandin; we're too late. The poor child must have wandered here in her delirium and fallen on this grave in a fresh seizure. See her thumbs!"

There was no mistaking the diagnostic sign; her thumbs were bent transversely across her palms and the fingers clutched them with all the avid tensity of rigor mortis.

"Epilepsy, no doubt of it," I diagnosed. "The history of her case as detailed by FitzPatrick is absolutely unmistakable. The poor girl's lived beneath this shadow for years without suspecting it — that was the reason for her 'queerness and perversity' that made her hardly tolerable. She was at the dangerous age, and when the blow fell it crushed her, absolutely."

The Frenchman knelt beside her, felt her wrist and temples, and listened at her breast, then rose with what seemed to me a strangely callous indifference. "Give me the gun," he ordered as he shed his jacket and draped it over Dolores' all but nude remains. "Do you take her up and bear her to the house, my friend.

"Have you read your Bible much of late?" he asked apropos of nothing as I trudged in his wake with the lovely body in my arms.

"My Bible?"

"Precisement. That portion which deals with those possessed of devils?"

"No — why d'ye ask?"

"I hardly know myself," he answered almost absently, holding back a branch from my path; "it was but a thought which came to me; perhaps it is of little value, perhaps, again, it may have application here. If so, I shall explain when the time has come."

The first faint sign came as I strode up the graveled walk toward FitzPatrick's house. Just as I was about to mount the lower step of the veranda I felt a slight stirring, the faintest suggestion of fluttering motion in my burden. I took the short flight in two giant leaps, and bent to examine her countenance in the porch light's glare. There was no doubt about it. She had relaxed her clutching hold upon her thumbs, and her lower jaw, which had fallen, had once more raised itself, closing the mouth and giving to the thin, pale face a look of natural sleep. Even as I gazed incredulously into her countenance her bosom trembled and a faint sigh escaped her.

"De Grandin!" I cried. "De Grandin, she's alive!"

He nodded shortly. "I thought as much," he said; then, his manner as professionally impersonal as though he were visiting physician at a charity hospital; "See that the blankets on her bed are well warmed, and that no disturbing noises are permitted near her room. I would suggest we administer the Brown-Sequard prescription; it is often efficacious."

However much it lacked in sympathy, his advice was medically sound. Within a week Dolores FitzPatrick appeared quite normal. In ten days more, against my protests, she had renewed her febrile social life, driving at breakneck speed along the country roads, attending all-night dances, scattering a trail of badly damaged masculine hearts behind her, and, worst of all, indulging in the villainous poison which passed for whisky among the younger set.

The Frenchman's lack of interest in the case amazed me. Curious as a child, he was ordinarily wont to give my cases as close attention as though they were his own, and his weakness for a pretty face was a standing joke between us, yet in Dolores FitzPatrick, beautiful, heartless and fascinating as Circe's own seductive self, he seemed to take no interest.

"Well," I announced as I entered the study one scorching night some three weeks later, "perhaps you'll be interested now. She's gone. She died an hour ago with cardiac hypertrophy; I knew she'd burn herself out."

For the first time his mask of indifference slipped. "Who will have the funeral — Monsieur Martin?" he asked.

"Yes, I've already made out the death certificate for him."

He reached for the phone and called the coroner's number. "It is a most strange request I have to make, Monsieur," he confessed when the connection had been made, "but you and I have been associated before. You will understand I do not act from idle curiosity. Will you permit that I be present while you embalm Mademoiselle FitzPatrick's body? You may consider it impertinent, but — nom d'un chou-fleur, do you tell me? But you will not honor it, surely? Dieu de Dieu, you will?"

"What now?" I asked as he put back the receiver and turned a blank face to me.

"A so strange testament has been found in Mademoiselle Dolores' room," he answered. "In it she does expressly request that she be not embalmed. You attended her, my friend, you have authority; will you not prevail on Monsieur FitzPatrick to have an autopsy performed?"

"I can't," I told him. "The cause of death was perfectly obvious; I've seen it coming for days, and warned FitzPatrick of it. He'd think me crazy."

"I shall think you worse, if you refuse."

"I'm sorry," I returned. "There's no earthly excuse for a post-mortem; I wouldn't think of asking one."

And there the matter rested.

The last humming echo of the final gong-stroke spent itself in the still summer air, and like the faintest whisper of a breeze among half-dried leaves came the subdued rustle which betokened turning heads and craning necks — that gesture which even well-bred people make at such a time.

A momentary congestion at the church door while six frock-coated and perspiring gentlemen bent their backs to the unaccustomed task, then:

"I am the Resurrection and the Life, saith the Lord: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live . . ."

Dr. Bentley's resonant voice sounded as he marched slowly up the aisle before the flower-decked casket. "I know that my Redeemer liveth and that He shall stand at the latter day upon the earth . . ."

The afternoon sun shone softly through the stained glass windows and glinted on the polished mahogany of the pews. Here and there it picked out spots of color, a flower, a woman's hat or a man's tie. Through a memorial panel to the right of the chancel a single beam of tinted light gleamed dully on the silver mountings of the casket. The majestic office for the burial of the dead proceeded to benediction, the choir's voices rose in "Lead, Kindly Light," drowning out the muffled boom of the traffic in the street beyond.

As the organ's final diminuendo vibrated to silence, the pallbearers rose to their appointed task and once more the solemn procession passed through the center aisle. A momentary lull came in the outside traffic as the suave mortician appeared on the church steps; then a motor purred to the curb, the hearse moved forward, and the procession was on its way.

Jules de Grandin tossed his burned-out cigarette from the window of Coroner Martin's limousine and gazed in undisguised admiration at the mortician. "You are marvelous, no less, Monsieur," he assured him. "In my own country, and anywhere in Europe, Mademoiselle FitzPatrick would have been consigned to the grave in four-and-twenty hours. We do not embalm there. Here, under similar conditions, you present her at the church three hot summer days after death as though she lay in natural sleep. Tell me," he leaned forward eagerly, "is it perhaps that you ignored the injunctions of her testament and embalmed her body after all?"

Martin shook his head. "Did you notice the casket?" he asked.

"It was a most beautiful piece of furniture," the Frenchman answered with non-committal politeness.

"I wasn't referring to its appearance, but to its construction," the other returned. "The outside case is mahogany, carefully glued and jointed, practically a water- and air-tight box. Inside is a shell technically known as an 'inner sealer,' a separate copper case with an hermetically sealed full-length top of plate glass. This, in turn, is lined with satin upholstery. Before we laid the young lady in this inner casket we put upward of a hundred briquettes of Carbon dioxide snow — the 'dry ice' used by confectioners to keep ice cream hard for long periods — under the satin trimmings. Then we fastened down the glass top and made it airtight with rubber gaskets and liquid cement. The air space between the inner and outer caskets, and the hermetic sealing of the inner case insured the carbon dioxide against rapid evaporation, the result being that the temperature in the inner casket is, and will continue for a long time to be, several degrees below freezing. You see?"

"Perfectly," de Grandin agreed with a quick nod. "You have refrigerated her — she will remain in her present condition indefinitely!"

"Well," Coroner Martin smiled deprecatingly, "I'm sure there'll be no immediate change in her condition, or —" he broke off abruptly, for we had arrived at the cemetery, and he was once more the busy official, directing an undrilled personnel in the performance of unfamiliar duties with the precision of a detachment of trained soldiers.

I kept my gaze fixed demurely on the ground, as befitted a physician whose patient was being buried, but Jules de Grandin permitted no conventions to hamper him. About the grave he strolled, taking eye-measurements of the location, noting the character of the upturned soil, examining the approaches with the practised eye of one who had seen much military service.

"There is a new moon tonight, Friend Trowbridge," he whispered as we re-entered Martin's car for the return trip; "be so good as to make no engagements, if you please."

"A new moon?" I echoed in amazement. "What the dickens are you drooling about? What has the new moon to do with us?"

"Nothing, I hope; much, I fear," he returned seriously.

His air of suppressed excitement told me he had some enterprise on foot, but his irritating habit of keeping his plans to himself was strong as ever. To all my questions he returned no more informative answer than a shrug of a lifted eyebrow. At length he turned his shoulder squarely on me, gazed out the window and fell to humming:

"Ma fille, pour penitence, Ron et ton, petit patapon, Ma fille, pour penitence, Nous nous embrasserons!"

The night air was heavy with dew and drenched with the perfume of honeysuckle as de Grandin and I let ourselves through the narrow door flanking the main entrance of the great Canterbury gate leading to Shadow Lawns Cemetery. Michaelson, the superintendent, was awaiting us in the office adjoining the graveyard's imposing Gothic chapel, and that he expected trouble of some sort was clearly evidenced by the heavy revolver swinging in a shoulder-holster beneath his left armpit. "Down, Hindenburg — charge!" he ordered gruffly as a monstrous police dog with baleful, green eyes half rose from its station before the fireless hearth and bared a set of awe-inspiring teeth.

"I've been on the lookout all evening," he told us as we shook hands, "but nothing's happened yet. Sure you got a straight tip, Doctor de Grandin?"

The Frenchman tweaked the carefully waxed ends of his tiny blond mustache. "My informant is one I have every reason to trust," he replied. "I am not surprised you have seen nothing thus far; but it might be well if we took our stations now, we know not when something may transpire."

"All right," Michaelson agreed, slipping on a dark jacket and snapping a woven-leather leash through the dog's collar. "Let's go."

As we walked along the winding, well kept roads beneath the arching trees toward the FitzPatrick family plot, "Mighty glad you got this information in time," the superintendent said. "Shadow Lawns has been operating more than fifty years, and we've never had a grave robbery, not even in the days when medical schools had to buy stolen bodies for their work. I'd hate to have our record broken now. Wonder if there'll be a gang of 'em?"

"I doubt it," de Grandin answered. "Indeed, I think this will be scarcely what could be called a grave robbery; it is more apt to be a violation."

"H'm, I don't think I quite follow you," Michaelson confessed as we took up our position in the shadow of an imposing bronze-and-granite monument. "What makes you so sure it will be tonight?"

"The moon — the new moon," the Frenchman replied.

"The mo — well, I'll be damned!" rejoined the other.

Our wait seemed interminable. The low, monotonous crooning of nocturnal insects in the grass, the occasional mournful cry of a night bird, the subdued echo of the traffic of the distant city — all blended into a continuous lullaby which more than once threatened to steal my consciousness. Michaelson yawned and stretched full length on the grass, Hindenburg lay with pointed nose between his outstretched paws in canine slumber, only Jules de Grandin remained watchful and alert.

I was on the point of pillowing my head upon my arm and snatching a nap when the sudden pressure of the Frenchman's fingers on my elbow roused me. "See, my friends," he whispered. "He comes!"

Stealthily as a shadow, a figure stole between the mounded graves toward the flower-decked hummock beneath which lay the body of Dolores FitzPatrick. The man was dressed in some sort of dark clothing, without a single highlight of white linen in his costume; consequently his visibility was low against the background of the night, but from the suppleness of his movements I realized he was young, and from the furtiveness of his manner I knew he was afraid.

"How the hell did that happen?" Michaelson demanded. "The main gate's the only one open, and Johnson's on guard there with a shotgun and orders not to let even the President of the United States by without a written pass from me."

"Ah bah," de Grandin whispered, "there never yet was fence so high that desperate men could not swarm over it, my friend, and this one is most desperate; make no mistake concerning that."

Michaelson's hand stole toward his gun. "Shall I wing him?" he asked.

"Mon Dieu, no!" de Grandin forbade. "Wait till I give the word."

The great dog roused to his haunches, and opened his mouth in an almost noiseless snarl, but the Frenchman's small hand stroked his smooth head and patted his bristling neck soothingly. "Down, mon brave," he whispered. "Our time is not yet." Children, dogs and women loved and trusted Jules de Grandin at sight. The savage brute rested its great head against his knee and seemed actually to nod understandingly in assent.

Meantime the figure at the grave had unslung a spade and pick-axe from the pack upon its back and commenced a furious attack on the soft, untamped earth. We watched in silence from our vantage-point, saw the parapet of defiled earth grow high and higher beside the grave, saw the digger descend lower and lower into the trench he made. From time to time the ghoul would pause, as though to measure the task yet incomplete, then renew his attack on the yielding loam with redoubled vigor.

It must have been an hour before he reached his grisly goal. We saw him cast aside his spade, bend forward in the excavation and fumble at the fastenings of the outer box which shielded the casket from the earth. Some fifteen minutes later he rose, took something from the sack which lay beside the opened grave and twisted it between his hands.

"What the hell?" Michaelson murmured wonderingly.

"A sheet, if I mistake not," de Grandin answered. "Watch carefully; his technique, it is good."

He was correct in his surmise. It was a sheet the resurrectionist twisted into a rope, then knotted into a sort of running noose and dropped into the grave. Straddling the desecrated sepulcher, one foot on each lip, the despoiler seized the loose ends of the sheet, twisted them together and hauled upward, like a man dragging a bucket from a curbless well.

Hand over hand he drew the twisted linen in, at length his task was done, and the ravished body of Dolores FitzPatrick came once more into the outer world, the linen band knotted behind her shoulders and crossing her breast transversely from underneath the arms. Her little head, crowned with its diadem of ruddy hair, hung backward limply, and her long white arms trailed listlessly behind her as the robber drew her from the rifled grave and laid her on the grass.

A sharp, metallic click sounded at my elbow. Michaelson had cocked his pistol and trained it on the ghoul, but de Grandin's quick wrestler's-grip upon his wrist arrested the shot. "Non, stupid one!" he bade. "Have I not said I will say when to shoot?"

From the corner of my eye I saw this by-play, but my horrified attention was riveted on the tableau at the grave. The robber had laid Dolores' body on the warm, dew-soaked turf, composed her limbs and folded her hands across her quiet bosom, then bent and rained a perfect torrent of kisses on the calm, dead face. "I'm here, dear love; I kept our compact!" he choked between ecstatic sobs. "I'll keep the promise to the end, and then you shall be mine, mine, all mine!" His voice rose almost to an hysterical shriek at the end, and before I realized what he did, he folded the dead form in his arms and pressed it to his breast as though it would respond to his mad caresses.

"Good heavens, a lunatic!" I whispered. "A necrophiliac; I've heard of such perverts, but —"

"Be still!" de Grandin's sharply whispered admonition cut me off. "Be quiet, great stupid-head, and watch what is to come!"

The madman raised the corpse in his arms as once I had borne her living body through the woods, gazed hurriedly about, then set off at a rapid pace toward the rising ground which marked the center of the cemetery.

Taking cover behind the intervening monuments, we followed, but our precautions were unnecessary, for so absorbed in his horrid task was the grave-robber that we might have walked at his heels, yet never been discovered.

A circular row of weeping willows crowned the hill toward which we moved, and in the center of the ring thus marked there stood a tall stone cross engraved with a five-word legend: Beloved Sleep. To this monolith the grave-despoiler bore his prey and laid her on the close-cropped grass before the cross, then knelt beside the body and clasped the slim, cold hands in both of his, while leaning forward, he gazed into the quiet face as though he would melt death's chill by the very ardor of his glance.

"And now, my friends, I damn think we shall see what we shall see!" de Grandin whispered. "Observe, if you please; the new moon rises."

He pointed upward as he spoke. There, beyond the line of willow trees soared the crescent moon, slim as a shaving from a silversmith's lathe, sharp as a sickle from the fields of Demeter.

And even as I spied the moon I saw another thing. Clear-cut as an image in a shadowgraph against the moon's faint luminance came a great black-winged owl, another and still a third, flying straight for the morbid group beneath the cross.

"Good Lord, de Grandin, look!" I whispered, but he shook my admonition off with an impatient shrug.

"Do you look there, my friend, and tell me what it is you see!" he ordered.

I glanced in the direction he indicated, then shook my head as though to clear a film from before my eyes. Surely, I did but fancy it!

No, there was no mistaking. As the silver shafts of moonlight fell upon it, the body of Dolores FitzPatrick seemed to gather itself together, the long-limbed looseness of post-mortem flaccidity passed, and the body was imbued with life. Distinctly as I ever saw a living person rise, I saw the body of the girl which had been buried that very afternoon uprear its head, its shoulders, and rouse to a half-sitting posture. More, it turned a living, conscious face upon the man beside it, and smiled into his eyes!

A low, trembling whine, no louder than a cricket's squeak, sounded at my feet. Hindenburg, the great, fierce dog, crouched and groveled on the grass, the hair upon his back raised in a bristling ruff, his bushy, wolf-like tail held closely to his hocks, every nerve in his powerful body trembling with abject fright.

"Now you may fire, my friend," de Grandin ordered Michaelson, and at the same time drew an automatic pistol from his pocket and sent a bullet winging on its way. But as he fired he contrived to stumble against Michaelson so that the latter's aim was deflected.

Both weapons spoke together, and there was a startled cry of pain as the echo of the shots reverberated through the graveyard.

"Quick, my friends, on him — chargez!" the Frenchman cried, leaping toward the man and girl who huddled in the shadow of the cross. He was a step or two before us, and I observed what Michaelson did not. As he reached his goal, he brought the barrel of his pistol crashing down upon the robber's head, striking him unconscious.

"Did we get him?" the superintendent asked, pausing beside the prostrate man.

"I think so," de Grandin flung over his shoulder as he bent above the girl. "Examine him, if you please."

As Michaelson bent above the man, de Grandin took the woman's body in his arms.

"Great heavens —" I began, but a sharp kick from the Frenchman's boot against my shin silenced my ejaculation half uttered. Yet it was hard to restrain myself, for in the fraction of a second while he lifted her I had seen the tiny, blue-black hole drilled through the girl's left temple by the small-calibered automatic the Frenchman carried, and saw the warm, fresh blood gush from the wound! Dead she undoubtedly was, but newly dead. That bullet had crashed through living flesh and bone into a living brain!

"Say, this feller's alive!" the superintendent cried. "He's unconscious, but I can't find a wound on him, and —"

"He was most likely stunned by a glancing bullet," de Grandin cut in. "Our aim is often erratic in the dark. Tie him securely and take him to the office; Dr. Trowbridge and I will join you as soon as we have returned this poor one to her grave."

"You're — you're sure she's dead?" Michaelson asked diffidently. "I know it sounds crazy as hell, but I'd have sworn I saw her move a moment ago, and —"

"Tiens, my friend, our eyes play strange tricks on us in the moonlight," the Frenchman interrupted hastily. "Come, Friend Trowbridge, let us go."

We walked a little way in silence; then, as though he were replying to my spoken thoughts, de Grandin said: "Do not press me for an explanation now, my friend. At present let us say my aim was poor and my bullet found the wrong mark. Scandal will be avoided if we let the dead bury the dead. Anon I shall surely tell you all."

"I think there is little to be gained by questioning him further," de Grandin counseled some two hours later when Michaelson had at last decided it was useless to press our prisoner for an explanation and was on the point of calling the police. "The families of all involved are prominent, and only ugly scandal can result from an expose, and that would do your cemetery little good, my friend. This young man's actions are undoubtlessly caused by mental derangement; Doctor Trowbridge and I will take charge of him, and see he is looked after. Meantime, Mademoiselle FitzPatrick's body is interred and none need be the wiser. It is best so, n'est-ce-pas?"

"H'm, guess you're right, sir," the superintendent agreed. "We'll just hush the whole rotten business up, eh?"

The little Frenchman nodded. "Come, Friend Trowbridge," he said, "let us be gone. Monsieur," he bowed politely to the prisoner, "we wait on your convenience."

At his suggestion I drove directly to the house and helped him escort the captive to the study. Once inside, de Grandin dropped his air of captor and motioned our charge to a comfortable chair. "You will smoke, perhaps?" he asked, proffering his case, then holding a match while the other set his cigarette aglow.

"And now, petit imbecile, it may be you will be good enough to explain the reason for this evening's lunacy to us?" he continued, seating himself across the desk from the prisoner and fixing him with a level unwinking stare.

No answer.

"Tiens, this is no coin in which to repay our kindness, Monsieur," he expostulated. "Consider how inconvenient we might have made things — may still make them, unless you choose to talk. Besides, we know so much already, you would be advised to tell us the rest."

"You don't know anything," the other answered sullenly.

"Ah, there is where you are most outrageously mistaken," de Grandin corrected. "We know, by example, that you are Robert Millington, son of Ralph Millington, cotton broker of New York and eminent church-member of Harrisonville, New Jersey. We know you were deeply — passionately to the point of insanity — in love with Mademoiselle Dolores; we know —"

"Leave her out of this!" the young man blazed. "I won't have —"

"Mille pardons, Monsieur," the Frenchman corrected in a cold voice, "you will have whatever we choose to give; no more, no less. Your escapade tonight has brought you to the very gate of prison, perhaps of the asylum for the insane, and you can best serve yourself by telling what we wish to know. You will speak?"

"You wouldn't believe me," the boy responded sullenly.

"You greatly underestimate our credulity, Monsieur. We are most trusting. We shall believe whatever you may say — provided it be the truth."

Young Millington took a deep breath, like one about to dive in icy waters. "She made me promise," he replied.

"Ah? We do make progress. What was it you promised her?"

A flush suffused the lad's cheeks, then receded, leaving them pale as death. "I loved her," he murmured, almost breathlessly. "I loved her more than anything in the world — more than family or friends, or" — he paused a moment, then, in a sort of awestruck whisper — "more than the salvation of my soul!"

"Eh bien, love is like that in the springtime of life," the little Frenchman nodded understandingly. He tweaked the ends of his tightly waxed mustache and nodded once again. "Have not I felt the same in the years so long buried beneath the sod of time? But certainly. Ah, la passion delicieuse!" He put his joined thumb and forefinger to his lips and wafted a kiss toward the ceiling. "Those moonlit evenings beside the river when we kissed and clung and shuddered in an ecstasy of exquisite torment! That matchless combination of humility and pride — that lunacy of adoration which made the adored one's heel-print in the dust more kissable than the lips of any other woman —"

"That's it — you understand!" the boy broke in hoarsely. "That's how I felt; so when she told me —"

The little Frenchman's sentimental mood vanished like the flame of a blown-out candle. "Precisement, when she told you —" he prompted sharply, his little round blue eyes holding the youth's gaze with an implacable, unwinking stare.

"She told me she was going to die — apparently," young Millington returned, as though the words were wrung from his unwilling lips. "She said she had an illness which only seeming death could cure, but that she wouldn't really die, and if I'd come to her grave and take her from it, and lay her where the first rays of the new moon could shine on her, she'd rise again, in perfect health, and we could go away —"

"Ah, poor besotted one!" de Grandin cried compassionately. "Truly, you would go away, for your chances of remaining in the world when once life had returned to those cruel jaws and force was once again behind those tiny, sharp teeth would have been less than that of the lamb attending a convention of famished wolves! No matter; go on. You believed her; like a silly fish you gobbled up her bait and did become her tool in this night's work. I see; I understand. Say no more, my poor foolish one. You may go, and we shall keep your secret securely in our breasts.

"Only" — he laid his hand kindly on the boy's shoulder at the door — "if you possess one single shred of gratitude, when next you go to church, thank God upon your knees that your scheme failed tonight."

"Thank God?" the boy retorted. "For what?"

"Tiens, for Jules de Grandin, if for nothing else," he answered. "Good night and much good luck to you, petit Monsieur."

"Now, perhaps, you'll condescend to tell me something?" I asked sarcastically as the echo of young Millington's footsteps died away.

"Exactement," he agreed, selecting a cigar from the humidor and snipping off its end with painstaking care. "To begin: I flout my citizenship of France like a banner proudly displayed before the enemy; but I am a citizen of the world, as well, my friend. The seven seas and five continents are no strangers to me. No, I have traveled, I have seen; I have observed. In the lazarets of a hundred places I have plied this gruesome trade of patching broken bodies which we follow, good friend, and the notebooks of my memory are full of entries. By example: in a stinking trading town of Java I was once called to treat a human wreck who had loved not wisely but altogether too well. The object of his passion was a savage she-tiger, a beast-cruel Sadist. She bit his lips away in the moment of embrace. He was a most unpleasant sight, one not to be forgotten, I do assure you.

"Very good. The other evening at the country club I did behold another poor one similarly maimed. Once seen, such injuries as that are not forgotten, and I needed no second glance at the poor young Faber's lips to tell me he was even as that other one in Java.

"'Now,' I asked me, 'who have so ruthlessly destroyed this young man's looks, and for what reason?'

"Reason there was none, but very lack of reason is often the best reason of all. This Mademoiselle Dolores, she has the history of taking all which is most precious to her cousin, not because it has a value of its own, but because her cousin prizes it. Therefore, I reason, she who once broke her cousin's dolls have now ravished away her fiancé and broken him, too. She did it from pure wantonness.

"And I am right, as usual. Next day, as I prepare to recondition the poor young Faber's lips I ask him certain questions, and he replied in writing. What does he tell me? Parbleu, you would be astonished!

"He says he accompanied Mademoiselle Dolores to the clearing where the moon shone, for she had said she wished to tell him something. Once there she tells him of her love and begs that he will desert her cousin Josephine and go away with her. But no, he is a young man of good principle. He will not do it; he repulses her. Ha, he spoke truly who first said hell has no fury like a scorned woman! Dolores asks that young Martin will give her one little kiss in token of farewell, and all men are weak where lovely women plead thus humbly. She lifts her face to his, and all suddenly he sees the flesh melt from off her bones, and it is in the bare-skulled face of a skeleton he looks as he is about to kiss her!

"He cries out and struggles to be free, but it are useless. Her slender arms are strong as steel, and her teeth — mon Dieu — her teeth are like shears of white-hot metal. They fasten on his yielding lips and clip them clear away! Voila, it is done, and sick with pain and horror he staggers blindly through the trees until we find him.

"So much I learn, and I think deeply. 'Who, or what, are this so strange being called Dolores?' I ask me.

"The nighttime comes, I go to bed and anon there comes a great and dreadful bird which claws at my window and makes dire threats against me if I divulge what I have learned that day. You say it are an owl. Perhaps. But does an owl talk with human words, my friend? Not ordinarily, you will concede.

"All quickly comes the call from Monsieur FitzPatrick, and to his house we go to seek the lost Dolores. The dog leads us well, but he scents something — something evil which we can not see — and turns to run away. Long since I have learned to trust the animal instinct which warns of evil and unseen things, and so I take us back to the house and ask for spiritual ammunition with which to fight the danger which awaits us in the cemetery."

"Yes, I wanted to ask you about that," I interrupted. "Wouldn't anything except a rosary and bottle of holy water serve as protection that night?"

"Many things," he agreed, "but they were handiest. The Church of Rome has no exclusive patent on fighting with and conquering the evil ones, but her methods are always efficacious — she has waged the battle so long, and so successfully."

"But why should a cross, just because it is a cross, be valuable in such a case?" I persisted.

He paused in thought a moment; then: "Words much repeated, with a special significance, in time acquire power," he replied. "Witchcraft is one of the world's oldest curses. Before Egypt was, the witch-cult flourished, and Babylonia and Assyria both understood the witch's awful power. Both had their charms against her, but they are gone, and their charms are gone with them. Then arose Christianity, and took up the battle with the witch-brood. Now, when a rosary is blessed and when holy water is dedicated, the priest says certain words — always the same, and always with the same intent. The formula has become invincible through centuries of repetition. Consider: You can not hear the music of your national anthem without a sudden tingling in your cheeks, a sudden contraction of the throat, a quick feeling of exaltation. Words, my friend, the power of words to conjure into sudden being a certain train of thought and a definite physical reaction. So it is with prayers oft repeated. Yes.

"Very well. With these spiritual weapons we returned to the old cemetery, and there we encounter and subdue three evil creatures which posed as bats. Perhaps they were such; perhaps, again, they were something else. At any rate, we routed them, and then we found Dolores apparently lying lifeless on a long-forgotten grave. Morbleu, the whole thing stank of witchery, my friend.

"Bethink you: It was the night of August first, the feast of St. Peter's Chains, or Lammas, as the English-speakers call it. That was one of the great gathering days of the witches of olden times, the others being Candlemas in February, Roodmass, or May Eve, and All Hallow Eve, or Halloween. And, my friend, in spite of all the learned fools tell us to the contrary, witchcraft still lives!

"Through the years and centuries it has given ground before the new religion, but in remote places it still survives. In Italy, despite repressive measures, 'the old religion' as they call it, la vecchia religione, still numbers many followers.

"And in other lands — in every land — who are better fitted to keep alive the old, unholy fires of witchcraft than the Gipsies? They are a race apart, they neither mingle nor intermarry with the people among whom they live. Their men may be thieves, but their women are open practitioners of the black art. Do they not boast of second sight and 'dukkering' and charms to injure enemies or break the spells laid on by others? But yes.

"Nor have actual proven instances of acts more sinister been lacking. In Estremadura four Gipsy women were taken by the Spanish government and made to own they had killed and eaten a friar, a pilgrim and a woman of their own tribe. And remember, Dolores' mother was a woman of the Spanish Gipsies. That has much bearing on the case.

"You will recall I asked you if you'd read your Bible lately concerning those possessed of devils? For why? Because the learned numbskulls who write the 'higher criticism' have been at pains to tell us demoniacal possession was but epilepsy. Perhaps, but will the rule not work both ways? If epilepsy may simulate possession by fiends, why should not such possession mimic epilepsy?

"'Nonsense,' you say? Ah hah, I damn think my hypothesis was proved when her you did think dead of epilepsy came suddenly to life in your very arms that night.

"I did foresee her second death. Yes. Her body was the dwelling-place of evil, and had been racked by its tenants. The sleep and rest of death was needed, and to it she resorted. Such cases are not unknown.

"And so, when she had apparently died a 'natural' death, I besought that she be embalmed, or that you have her subjected to an autopsy, so that she might be forever rendered incapable of functioning as a living being again.

"But she was clever — almost as clever as I. She had outguessed modern mortuary science by leaving a testament expressly forbidding embalming, and you refused an autopsy.

"By Monsieur FitzPatrick's permission I went through all her correspondence. There she had been lax — she had not thought of Jules de Grandin, for he had simulated indifference in her case and had not called upon her once while his good friend Trowbridge was treating her to prevent the death she had already decided on.

"Among her papers I found but little that would guide me, but finally I came on that which I did seek, a little note from the young Millington in answer to one of hers, and in it he did renew his promise to take her from the grave, 'if she should die' (how well she had rehearsed him for his role!) and lay her body where the first faint rays of the new moon might rest upon it!

"That was the key, my friend. In Greece, where warlocks still make sport of science and religion, when members of the witch-cult desire to shift their scene of operations, or when discovery hovers close behind them, they take refuge in the tomb. They 'die' as this one did. But always their 'deaths' are due to some cause which leaves no outward wound upon their bodies — no injury which would prevent their future functioning. Then, if they be exhumed and placed beneath the new moon's rays, soon after burial, they rise again, as though refreshed by the nap taken in the grave — and woe betide the poor unfortunate who catches their first waking glance! With teeth and nails, like maddened brute beasts, they tear his throat away, and rip his heart from out his breast and eat it. It is their custom so to do; a most unpleasant one, I think.

"Accordingly, we watched beside her grave tonight; we saw the poor, infatuated Millington exhume her; we saw him bear her to the hilltop and lay her where the moon could shine upon her; we even saw the beginning of her return to life and wickedness. But Jules de Grandin nipped her resurrection in the bud by shooting her, and now her lovely body lies in the grave with shattered brain, and never more may evil spirits use it for their evil ends. No, she has said at last to the grave, 'Thou art my father and my mother,' and to corruption, 'Thou art my lover and my bridegroom.' Her business in this world is finished."

"But," I began, "in the philosophy of witchcraft —"

"Ho, you do remind me of another philosophy," he interrupted with a grin:

"Who loves not woman, wine and song Remains a fool his whole life long.

"I sing most execrably; the love of woman is a gift denied me; but thanks be to kindly heaven my taste for wine is unabated. Come, let us drink and go to bed!"