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A deep voice answered, speaking English in a strange accent that was neither French nor Irish. “I am as real as life and death.”

In the next moment the newcomer turned to the girl, who was still cowering away.His voice was softer, and almost tender. “Lucy,my dear, your sisters are waiting for you at home, in the land beyond the forest. I am ready to take you to them.”

“I do not want to go!”

“But you cannot continue in this way.”H e might almost have been a parent, remonstrating with a wayward child. “Your vanishing from the hospital. Your toying with this man.”

She dared to raise her eyes, and pleaded piteously. “He is my sweet little—”

The man took another step toward her, and spoke in a tone charged with menace. “Silence! These games you play will bring again the hunters down upon us, with their crosses and their garlic and their stakes!”

When Lucy struggled, he knocked her down with a single blow from the flat of his hand.

That was not to be borne, and the instinct of manhood in me sent me springing out of bed, bent on defending the girl.

Honorable as my intentions were, and sincere my effort, the only result was that the nightmare seemed to close upon me with new force. Seizing me by the throat, in a one-handed grip of iron, my opponent forced my body back upon the bed,meanwhile murmuring something of which the only two words I could hear clearly were “misplaced chivalry.”

Meanwhile, Lucy had regained her feet, and she in turn tried to come to my aid. But with his right hand the tall man caught her by the hair and forced her to her knees, saying, “You will see him no more.”

Those were the last words I heard from either of my visitors. Struggle as I might, I could not loosen the dark man’s grip by even a fraction of an inch. I doubt whether I could have succeeded even had I been able to use both hands, which of course I could not. And once more darkness overcame me.

WHEN I RECOVERED CONSCIOUSNESS THIS MORNING, there were no blood spots on my pillow. But there were bruises on my throat beneath my beard, five small purpling spots that must have been made by the grip of a single hand, a left hand, of overpowering strength—and it is blessedly clear to me that with my own left hand, injured as it is, I could never have done this to myself. Charcot, when I managed to see him today at the hospital, confirmed the reality of the bruises—as indeed the internal soreness of my throat had already done, to my own full satisfaction. To explain them to the doctor I made up some tale of a scuffle with a would-be robber in the street.

I am ecstatic with a sense of glorious relief: the man who with one hand overpowered me was a terrible opponent, fit to inhabit a nightmare—but he was real! So was Lucy, my girlish “succubus,” truly in my room, and so were all the visits she has paid me. Nothing that has happened was the product of an infected and disordered brain.Whether or not Lucy is ever to appear to me again, and whatever the ultimate explanation of the mystery, it has nothing, nothing whatever to do with locomotor ataxia.

One might think this knowledge a new occasion for terror, this time of the supernatural. But the dominant emotion it arouses in me is a relief so strong that it is almost terrible in quite a different way.

I do not, after all, find myself doomed, hopelessly succumbing to the tertiary stage of syphilis. I can hope to avoid that stage entirely, as do most victims of the disease. Whatever bizarre powers may have intruded in my life, and whether or not they are of occult derivation, my fate is at least not that.

I FINDI MUST ADD A POSTSCRIPT TO THIS JOURNAL. I visited Charcot again this afternoon, and thanked him for his efforts as I paid his bill. I told him nothing of last night’s events. The doctor, as might be expected, sympathizes with my bruised throat. But Charcot remains unable to regard my nocturnal experiences with Lucy as anything but dreams or delusions. He still doubted that a physical lesion of the brain, caused by disease, was