in the mystic practices to which his
intellect had been debased, and who was said
to have acquired a singular influence over him
partly by her beauty, and partly by the
tenderness with which she had nursed him through
his long decline: the other, an Indian, specially
assigned to her service, of whom all the wild
retainers of Grayle spoke with detestation
and terror. He was believed by them to
belong to that murderous sect of fanatics whose
existence as a community has only recently
been made known to Europe, and who strangle
their unsuspecting victim in the firm belief
that they thereby propitiate the favour of the
goddess they serve. The current opinion at
Aleppo was, that if these two persons had
conspired to murder Haroun, perhaps for the sake
of the treasures he was said to possess, it was
still more certain that they had made away with
their own English lord, whether for the sake of
the jewels he wore about him, or for the sake of
treasures less doubtful than those imputed to
Haroun and of which the hiding-place would to
them be much better known. "I did not share
that opinion," wrote the narrator; "for I assured
myself that Ayesha sincerely loved her awful
master; and that love need excite no wonder, for
Louis Grayle was one whom if a woman, and
especially a woman of the East, had once loved,
before old age and infirmity fell on him, she
would love and cherish still more devotedly when
it became her task to protect the being who, in
his day of power and command, had exalted his
slave into the rank of his pupil and companion.
And the Indian whom Grayle had assigned to
her service, was allowed to have that brute
kind of fidelity which, though it recoils from no
crime for a master, refuses all crime against
him.

"I came to the conclusion that Haroun had
been murdered by order of Louis Grayle—for the
sake of the elixir of life—murdered by Jurna the
Strangler; and that Grayle himself had been aided
in his flight from Aleppo, and tended, through
the effects of the life-giving drug thus
murderously obtained, by the womanly love of
the Arab woman, Ayesha. These convictions
(since I could not without being ridiculed as the
wildest of dupes even hint at the vital elixir) I
failed to impress on the Eastern officials, or even
on a countryman of my own whom I chanced to
find at Aleppo. They only arrived at what
seemed the common-sense verdict—viz. Haroun
might have been strangled, or might have died
in a fit (the body, little examined, was buried
long before I came to Aleppo); Louis Grayle
was murdered by his own treacherous dependents.
But all trace of the fugitives was lost.

"And now," wrote Sir Philip, "I will state by
what means I discovered that Louis Grayle
still lived—changed from age into youth; a
new form, a new being; realising, I verily
believe, the image which Haroun's words had
raised up, in what then seemed to me the
metaphysics of phantasy; criminal, without
consciousness of crime; the dreadest of the mere
animal race; an incarnation of the blind powers
of Nature—beautiful and joyous, wanton, and
terrible, and destroying! Such as ancient myths
have personified in the idols of Oriental creed;
such as Nature, of herself, might form man in her
moments of favour, if man were wholly the
animal, and spirit were no longer the essential
distinction between himself and the races to which
by superior formation and subtler perceptions
he would still be the king.

"But this being is yet more dire and portentous
than the mere animal man, for in him are not only
the fragmentary memories of a pristine intelligence
which no mind, unaided by the presence of
soul, could have originally compassed, but amidst
that intelligence are the secrets of the magic
which is learned through the agencies of spirits,
to our race the most hostile. And who shall say
whether the fiends do not enter at their will this
void and deserted temple whence the soul has
departed, and use as their tools, passive and
unconscious, all the faculties which, skilful in
sorcery, still place a Mind at the control of their
malice?

"It was in the interest excited in me by the
strange and terrible fate that befel an Armenian
family with which I was slightly acquainted, that
I first traced, in the creature I am now about to
describe, and whose course I devote myself to
watch and trust to bring to a close—the
murderer of Haroun for the sake of the elixir
of youth.

"In this Armenian family there were three
daughters; one of them——"

I had just read thus far when a dim Shadow
fell over the page, and a cold air seemed to
breathe on me. Cold—so cold, that my blood
halted in my veins as if suddenly frozen!
Involuntarily I started, and looked up, sure that some
ghastly presence was in the room. And then,
on the opposite side of the wall,  I beheld an
unsubstantial likeness of a human form. Shadow I
call it, but the word is not strictly correct,
or it was luminous, though with a pale
shine. In some exhibition in London there is
shown a curious instance of optical illusion;
at the end of a corridor you see, apparently in
strong light, a human skull. You are convinced
it is there as you approach; it is, however, only a
reflexion from a skull at a distance. The image
before me was less vivid, less seemingly prominent
than is the illusion I speak of. I was not
deceived. I felt it was a spectrum, a phantasm,
but I felt no less surely that it was a reflexion
from an animate form—the form and the face of
Margrave: it was there, distinct, unmistakable.
Conceiving that he himself must be behind me, I
sought to rise, to turn round, to examine. I
could not move: limb and muscle were over-
mastered by some incomprehensible spell. Gradually
my senses forsook me, I became unconscious
as well as motionless. When I recovered I
heard the clock strike Three. I must have
been nearly two hours insensible; the candles