On the evening of the following Sunday Hartley was interrupted in his task of tying together the pages of his completed manuscript by the appearance of Repellier.
He seemed the same old Repellier to Hartley, with the same merry smile and the quiet eyes that had always silently reminded the younger man that he was still young and that youth can never know tranquillity. But about the older man on this occasion, for all his quietness of demeanor, there clung an air of unusual sternness.
"Are you busy?" he asked, as he beheld the paper-littered desk. "I only dropped up to borrow a book of yours that you've often spoken of--The Silver Poppy. I've been overworking, they tell me, and for the rest of the week I'm going to loaf."
He confessed, as Hartley gladly enough produced the volume, that he had never as yet read it--his days had all been so taken up that he got little time for the newer fiction. But only that morning he had picked up an old newspaper notice of the dramatized story and had been unusually interested by it.
"It's rather clever?" Repellier asked, taking the book and skimming through it where he stood. Something in his question seemed almost laughable to the younger man.
"It will open your eyes," was all he said, however.
"I hope it will," said Repellier, slowly closing the volume and slipping it meditatively into his pocket. Then he looked at the still smiling man and asked:
"That all depends," answered Hartley, motioning his visitor to an armchair.
"Well, let me tell it to you, anyway. Then you can think it over by yourself and see if there's anything in it. May I?"
"This story that I've picked up begins rather oddly, but it runs this way: On an island--I think it's called Muciana, at the mouth of the Amazon, a surveying party found a mysterious skeleton, or rather portions of a mysterious skeleton, half buried in a sand-bar. This skeleton puzzled biologists very much; it seemed to indicate there was some possibility that the once mythical creature known as the man-eating vampire really existed--that somewhere about the head waters of the Amazon actually lived or had lived pterodactyli of enormous size, much larger than the common enough blood-sucking bats of the lower river--which to-day, as you know, rather relish a sip or two of any warm-blooded animal. Many of these bones were strangely human in appearance, but attached to what remained of the skeleton were a pair of powerful and perfectly formed pterodactyl wings. All efforts to piece together this strange creature were a failure, and in the end it was given up as impossible. But am I boring you?"