As for me, I was equally sure that blood was telling now; and telling in the atrocious tongue of the depths. I felt that the end had come. Vain, vain, all the labor, all the love, all the hope, the prayers, the pride! The submerged voice of his old life was calling him; the vampire extended her white and murderous arms in which many and many had died shamefully; she lifted to his her insatiable lips stained scarlet with the wine of hell. Against that siren smile, those beckoning hands, I could do nothing. The very fact that I was what I am, was no longer a help, but rather a hindrance; he recognized in the priest a deterring and detaining influence against which he rebelled, and which he wished to repudiate. He was, as he had said so terribly, "home-sick for hell." He would go, and he would most inevitably be caught in the whirlpools; the naturalist, the scientist, the Butterfly Man, would be sucked into that boiling vortex and drowned beyond all hope of resuscitation; but from it the soul of Slippy McGee would emerge, with a larger knowledge and a clearer brain, a thousand-fold more deadly dangerous than of old; because this time he knew better and had deliberately chosen the evil and rejected the good. By the law of the pendulum he must swing as far backward into wrong as he had swung forward into right. I could not bring myself to speak to him, I dared not bid him the mockery of a Godspeed upon his journey, dreading as I did that journey's end. So I stood at a window and watched him as with suitcase in hand he walked down our shady street. At the corner he turned and lifted his hat in a last farewell salute to my mother, standing looking after him in the Parish House gate. Then he turned down the side-street, and so disappeared. From his closed rooms came a long wailing howl. For the first time Kerry might not follow his master; more yet, the master had thrust the astonished dog into his bedroom and shut the door upon him. He had refused to recognize the scratch at the door, the snuffling whine through the keyhole. The outer door had slammed. Kerry raced to the window. And the master was going, and going without him! He had neither net, knapsack, nor bottle-belt, but he carried a suitcase. He did not look back, nor whistle: he _meant_ to leave him behind. Sensing that an untoward thing was occurring, a thing that boded no good to himself or his beloved, the red dog lifted his voice and howled a piercing protest. The sash was down, but the blinds had not yet been closed to. One saw Kerry standing with his forepaws on the window-sill, his nose against the glass, his ears lifted, his eyes anxious and distressed, his lip caught in his teeth. At intervals he threw back his head, and then came the howls.