y, yet concealing the fires of a fierce passion beneath, it
might well assume the form of a creature that seemed to be half dog,
half wolf--"

"A werewolf, you mean?" cried Maloney, pale to the lips as he listened.

John Silence held up a restraining hand. "A werewolf," he said, "is a
true psychical fact of profound significance, however absurdly it may
have been exaggerated by the imaginations of a superstitious peasantry
in the days of unenlightenment, for a werewolf is nothing but the
savage, and possibly sanguinary, instincts of a passionate man scouring
the world in his fluidic body, his passion body, his body of desire. As
in the case at hand, he may not know it--"

"It is not necessarily deliberate, then?" Maloney put in quickly, with
relief.

"--It is hardly ever deliberate. It is the desires released in sleep
from the control of the will finding a vent. In all savage races it has
been recognised and dreaded, this phenomenon styled 'Wehr Wolf,' but
to-day it is rare. And it is becoming rarer still, for the world grows
tame and civilised, emotions have become refined, desires lukewarm, and
few men have savagery enough left in them to generate impulses of such
intense force, and certainly not to project them in animal form."

"By Gad!" exclaimed the clergyman breathlessly, and with increasing
excitement, "then I feel I must tell you--what has been given to me in
confidence--that Sangree has in him an admixture of savage blood--of Red
Indian ancestry--"

"Let us stick to our supposition of a man as described," the doctor
stopped him calmly, "and let us imagine that he has in him this
admixture of savage blood; and further, that he is wholly unaware of his
dreadful physical and psychical infirmity; and that he suddenly finds
himself leading the primitive life together with the object of his
desires; with the result that the strain of the untamed wild-man in his
blood--"

"Red Indian, for instance," from Maloney.

"Red Indian, perfectly," agreed the doctor; "the result, I say, that
this savage strain in him is awakened and leaps into passionate life.
What then?"

He looked hard at Timothy Maloney, and the clergyman looked hard at him.

"The wild life such as you lead here on this island, for instance,
might quickly awaken his savage instincts--his buried instincts--and
with profoundly disquieting results."

"You mean his Subtle Body, as you call it, might issue forth
automatically in deep sleep and seek