He looked hard at Timothy Maloney, and the clergyman looked hard at him.

“The wild life such as you lead here on this island, for instance, might quickly awaken his savage instincts—­his buried instincts—­and with profoundly disquieting results.”

“You mean his Subtle Body, as you call it, might issue forth automatically in deep sleep and seek the object of its desire?” I said, coming to Maloney’s aid, who was finding it more and more difficult to get words.

“Precisely;—­yet the desire of the man remaining utterly unmalefic—­pure and wholesome in every sense—­”

“Ah!” I heard the clergyman gasp.

“The lover’s desire for union run wild, run savage, tearing its way out in primitive, untamed fashion, I mean,” continued the doctor, striving to make himself clear to a mind bounded by conventional thought and knowledge; “for the desire to possess, remember, may easily become importunate, and, embodied in this animal form of the Subtle Body which acts as its vehicle, may go forth to tear in pieces all that obstructs, to reach to the very heart of the loved object and seize it. Au fond, it is nothing more than the aspiration for union, as I said—­the splendid and perfectly clean desire to absorb utterly into itself—­”

He paused a moment and looked into Maloney’s eyes.

“To bathe in the very heart’s blood of the one desired,” he added with grave emphasis.

The fire spurted and crackled and made me start, but Maloney found relief in a genuine shudder, and I saw him turn his head and look about him from the sea to the trees.  The wind dropped just at that moment and the doctor’s words rang sharply through the stillness.

“Then it might even kill?” stammered the clergyman presently in a hushed voice, and with a little forced laugh by way of protest that sounded quite ghastly.

“In the last resort it might kill,” repeated Dr. Silence.  Then, after another pause, during which he was clearly debating how much or how little it was wise to give to his audience, he continued:  “And if the Double does not succeed in getting back to its physical body, that physical body would wake an imbecile—­an idiot—­or perhaps never wake at all.”

Maloney sat up and found his tongue.

“You mean that if this fluid animal thing, or whatever it is, should be prevented getting back, the man might never wake again?” he asked, with shaking voice.

“He might be dead,” replied the other calmly.  The tremor of a positive sensation shivered in the air about us.

“Then isn’t that the best way to cure the fool—­the brute—?” thundered the clergyman, half rising to his feet.

“Certainly it would be an easy and undiscoverable form of murder,” was the stern reply, spoken as calmly as though it were a remark about the weather.

Maloney collapsed visibly, and I gathered the wood over the fire and coaxed up a blaze.