"If I thought you could not resist, Paula," Madame Nestor said, "I should advise you to flee to the remotest country--this moment. I should implore you never to allow from your side your best and strongest friend. But I have studied your brain, your strength, your heart. I love you for the thought that has come to me--that it is you, Paula Linster, who is destined to free the race from this destroyer." Often in the last half-hour had come a great inward revolt against the trend of her caller's words. It passed through Paula again, yet she inquired how she could thus be the means. "By resisting him. Bellingham once told me--trust him, this was after I was fully his--that if I had matched his force with a psychic resistance equally as strong--it would mortally have weakened him. So if he seeks to subvert your will and fails, this great one-pointed power of his, developed who knows how long--will turn and rend itself. This is an occult law." Paula could understand this--the wild beast of physical desire rending itself at the last--but not the conception of hopelessness--Bellingham cut off from immortality. The woman divined her thoughts. "Again I beg of you," she said in excitement, "not to let a thought of pity for him insinuate itself in your brain--not the finest point of it! Think of yourself, of the Great Good which must sustain you, of the benefit to your race--think of the women less strong! Fail in this, and Bellingham will absorb your splendid forces, and let you fall back into the common as I did--to rise again, ah, so bitterly, so wearily!... But I cannot imagine you failing, you strong young queen, and the women like me, the legion of emptied shells he has left behind--we shall canonize you, Paula, if you shatter the vampire's power." Thoughts came too fast for speech now. They burned Paula's mind--a destructive activity, because ineffectual. She wanted to speak of the shameful experience of the morning, but she could not bring the words to confession. "I had almost forgotten," she said lightly at length, "that it is well for one to eat and drink. Stay, won't you please, and share a bite of supper with me, Madame Nestor? We'll talk of other things. I am deadly tired of Bellingham."