That same night Uncle Jenico and Harry and I were supping at the rectory. The occasion is vivid in my memory because of a story which Mr. Sant told us. After the meal we had drawn our chairs to the fire, and moved, perhaps, by the unearthly racket overhead, were fallen upon talk of the supernatural. The house lay so close-shut within trees that the booming of the tempest came to us half muffled. In its pauses, we could even hear the drip from broken gutters treading the drive beneath, upon which the dining-room windows looked, with a sound like stealthy footsteps. It brought to his mind, said Mr. Sant, a legend he had once heard about a werewolf--the German vampire. These creatures, men by day, but condemned, for their unspeakable crimes, to become wolves with the going down of the sun, are like nothing mortal. It is forbidden to notice, to pity, to sympathize with them in any way. Whosoever does, yields himself to their thrall. One winter evening a peasant-woman, belated in the snow-bound woods, was hurrying home, with her basket of provisions for the morrow over her arm, when she heard a pattering behind her, and looking back, there was a werewolf following. In the hunger of the miserable creature’s face she saw an expression which haunted while it terrified her. It was faintly suggestive of something, or somebody; but of what or whom she could not tell. Yet the lost horror in it moved her in spite of herself. Her pity mastered her fear. She took meat from her basket and threw it back, conscious of her secret sin. “But who will know!” she thought; “and I could not sleep without.” The creature stopped to devour the morsel, which enabled the woman to escape and reach her home in safety. But all the following day her deed dwelt with her, so that towards evening, unable to bear her own sole confidence any longer, she went down to the lonely church to confess her sin and be absolved of it. She rang the little sacristy bell, and summoned the solitary confesser. He came, and behind the bars heard her avowal. Then, as listening to it he turned his face, she saw that snap and change in the gloom. The eyes rounded, the brows puckered and met, the jaw shot down and forth. Before her, glaring through the bars, was the werewolf of the preceding night. It barked and snapped at the grating which divided them, then dropped, and she heard it issue forth and come pattering round to the side where----