Zoberg smiled at him, then turned to Judge Pursuivant. "Your ectoplasmic theory of lycanthropy--such as you have explained it to me--is most interesting and, I think, valid. May I advance it a trifle?" "In what way?" asked the judge. "Ectoplasm, as you see it, forms the werewolf by building upon the medium's body. But is not ectoplasm more apt, according to the observations of many people, to draw completely away and form a separate and complete thing of itself? The thing may be beastly, as you suggest. Algernon Blackwood, the English writer of psychic stories, almost hits upon it in one of his 'John Silence' tales. He described an astral personality taking form and threatening harm while its physical body slept." "I know the story you mean," agreed Judge Pursuivant. "_The Camp of the Dog_, I think it's called." "Very well, then. Perhaps, while Miss Susan's body lay in a trance, securely handcuffed between Wills and myself----" "Oh!" wailed Susan. "Then it was I, after all." "It couldn't have been you," I told her at once. "But it was! And, while I was at the judge's home with you, part of me met the constable's brother in this wood." She stared wildly around her. "It might as well have been part of _me_," I argued, and O'Bryant glared at me as if in sudden support of that likelihood. But Susan shook her head. "No, for which of us responded to the call of that thing out there?" For the hundredth time she gazed fearfully through the fire at the bushes behind which the commanding whine had risen. "I have within me," she said dully, "a nature that will break out, look and act like a beast-demon, will kill even my beloved father----" "Please," interjected Judge Pursuivant earnestly, "you must not take responsibility upon yourself for what happened. If the ectoplasm engendered by you made up the form of the killer, the spirit may have come from without." "How could it?" she asked wretchedly. "How could Marthe Beraud exude ectoplasm that formed a bearded, masculine body?" Pursuivant looked across to Zoberg. "Doctor, you surely know the famous 'Bien Boa' séance, and how the materialized entity spoke Arabic when the medium, a Frenchwoman, knew little or nothing of that language?" Zoberg sat with bearded chin on lean hand. His joined brows bristled the more as he corrugated his forehead in thought. "We are each a thousand personalities," he said, sententiously if not comfortingly. "How can we rule them all, or rule even one of them?" * * * * * O'Bryant said sourly that all this talk was too high flown for him to understand or to enjoy. He dared hope, however, that the case could never be tied up to Miss Susan Gird, whom he had known and liked since her babyhood. "It can never do that," Zoberg said definitely. "No court or jury would convict her on the evidence we are offering against her."