As Derby muttered on I turned to look at him closely, verifying the impression of change which an earlier scrutiny had given me. Paradoxically, he seemed in better shape than usual--harder, more normally developed, and without the trace of sickly flabbiness caused by his indolent habits. It was as if he had been really active and properly exercised for the first time in his coddled life, and I judged that Asenath's force must have pushed him into unwonted channels of motion and alertness. But just now his mind was in a pitiable state; for he was mumbling wild extravagances about his wife, about black magic, about old Ephraim, and about some revelation which would convince even me. He repeated names which I recognized from bygone browsings in forbidden volumes, and at times made me shudder with a certain thread of mythological consistency--of convincing coherence--which ran through his maundering. Again and again he would pause, as if to gather courage for some final and terrible disclosure. "Dan, Dan, don't you remember him--the wild eyes and the unkempt beard that never turned white? He glared at me once, and I never forgot it. Now _she_ glares that way. _And I know why!_ He found it in the _Necronomicon_--the formula. I don't dare tell you the page yet, but when I do you can read and understand. Then you will know what has engulfed me. On, on, on, on--body to body to body--he means never to die. The life-glow--he knows how to break the link ... it can flicker on a while even when the body is dead. I'll give you hints and maybe you'll guess. Listen, Dan--do you know why my wife always takes such pains with that silly back-hand writing? Have you ever seen a manuscript of old Ephraim's? Do you want to know why I shivered when I saw some hasty notes Asenath had jotted down? "Asenath--_is there such a person?_ Why did they half think there was poison in old Ephraim's stomach? Why do the Gilmans whisper about the way he shrieked--like a frightened child--when he went mad and Asenath locked him up in the padded attic room where--the other--had been? _Was it old Ephraim's soul that was locked in?_ _Who locked in whom?_ Why had he been looking for months for someone with a fine mind and a weak will? Why did he curse that his daughter wasn't a son? Tell me, Daniel Upton--_what devilish exchange was perpetrated in the house of horror where that blasphemous monster had his trusting, weak-willed, half-human child at his mercy?_ Didn't he make it permanent--as she'll do in the end with me? Tell me why that thing that calls itself Asenath writes differently off guard, _so that you can't tell its script from_----" * * * * *