The vampire nemesis and other weird stories of the China coast Read Online Free PDF Page A

cried, with eyes brimming with roguishness, " the distressed damsel has already been succoured by a gallant knight. Permit me " Then, catching our looks of mutual recognition, " Ah ! but I see you already know each other. How jolly ! "
    Seeing there was no further excuse for intruding my company, I was about to raise my cap and turn away, when she interposed—

    " But surely Mr. Keith is not going to be so selfish as to ride away without giving us a chance of showing him our gratitude ? Mr. Rawdon," she turned imperiously towards him, " please persuade your friend to accompany us and accept a cup of tea."
    Rawdon's face was showing as much annoyance as such faces are capable of exhibiting, but he managed to mumble some polite phrase expressive of his wish that I should accompany them. As much to chastise his selfishness as for anything else, I readily conceded, and away we went again three abreast.
    " You see, Mr. Keith, my machine might break down again," Miss Langarde murmured demurely, at which remark reflecting on his usefulness as an escort, Rawdon's brow grew blacker yet.
    This was the beginning of a friendship that blossomed into intimacy and soon ripened into love. A little more than three months from that lucky day, Ethel and I were made man and wife, and it was only then I discovered that Rawdon had had aspirations toward the same goal. He seemed to take the matter so lightly that I felt almost angry with him for being willing to surrender so rich a prize thus easily. It was, I told myself indignantly, a slight on my wife. How could any man know Ethel and not be in love with her ?

    He declined to be present at the wedding reception —the whole affair was as quiet as we could make it, for when two people are really happy they do not like to proclaim it from the housetops—but he sent Ethel a magnificent collection of Cashmere shawls, which we understood had been accumulated during his lengthy sojourn in India. He declined with equal persistency to accept any of our invitations, always having some valid excuse, and so gradually Arnold Rawdon dropped out of our life.

    II.
    Of the major part of my career I need say little. They who have read the Shanghai papers of the last few weeks will have seen it blazoned forth again and again, with wearisome iteration, ever with the addition of some fictitious detail to excuse the repetition of the stale story. I will, therefore, go over the old ground no further than to say that until recently I held the position of sub-editor on that thriving daily, the Eastern Echo, with every prospect of ultimately fighting my way to the top of the journalistic ladder.
    Mental science had always been to me a topic of absorbing interest to which I had devoted all my spare time, following with avidity the abstruse speculations in both its branches, both the psychic and metaphysic. Though the transcendentalism of Descartes, Kant, and Reid had a great fascination for me, it was to mesmerism and the allied phenomena of hypnotism that I directed most of my researches. It was in the arduous pursuit of these that I came in contact with spiritualism before leaving home for the East, and in the sanguineness of youth dreamed that here was the medium by which the phenomena of mind were to be brought to the demonstrable level of the exact sciences. In this I was unfortunate, for in the attempt of its devotees to pick the lock of eternity and reveal matters behind the awful veil, my eyes were slowly, yet surely, opened to their rank charlatanism. Medium after medium was detected in the act of strumming surreptitious banjos or rapping on the table with would-be invisible fingers.

    The result was that with the rashness of young blood I held that the induction which applied so fittingly to spiritualism was equally true of mesmerism and hypnotism, by the %id of which they claimed to work wonders, and I angrily denounced the whole thing as a hollow fraud.
    In the revulsion of disgust, I resolved to devote my