Her manner was unmistakable, and she sought

him out on every possible occasion. Chaste and sweet she was

undoubtedly, yet frankly inviting; and she won him utterly with the

first glance of her shining eyes, even if she had not already done so

in the dark merely by the magic of her invisible presence.

“You felt she was altogether wholesome and good!”

queried the doctor. “You had no reaction of any sort—for instance, of

alarm?”

Vezin looked up sharply with one of his inimitable

little apologetic smiles. It was some time before he replied. The mere

memory of the adventure had suffused his shy face with blushes, and his

brown eyes sought the floor again before he answered.

“I don’t think I can quite say that,” he explained

presently. “I acknowledged certain qualms, sitting up in my room

afterwards. A conviction grew upon me that there was something about

her—how shall I express it?—well, something unholy. It is not

impurity in any sense, physical or mental, that I mean, but something

quite indefinable that gave me a vague sensation of the creeps. She

drew me, and at the same time repelled me, more than—than–-“

He hesitated, blushing furiously, and unable to finish the sentence.

“Nothing like it has ever come to me before or

since,” he concluded, with lame confusion. “I suppose it was, as you

suggested just now, something of an enchantment. At any rate, it was

strong enough to make me feel that I would stay in that awful little

haunted town for years if only I could see her every day, hear her

voice, watch her wonderful movements, and sometimes, perhaps, touch her

hand.”

“Can you explain to me what you felt was the source

of her power?” John Silence asked, looking purposely anywhere but at

the narrator.

“I am surprised that you should ask me such a

question,” answered Vezin, with the nearest approach to dignity he

could manage. “I think no man can describe to another convincingly

wherein lies the magic of the woman who ensnares him. I certainly

cannot. I can only say this slip of a girl bewitched me, and the mere

knowledge that she was living and sleeping in the same house filled me

with an extraordinary sense of delight.

“But there’s one thing I can tell you,” he went on

earnestly, his eyes aglow, “namely, that she seemed to sum up and

synthesise in herself all the strange hidden forces that operated so

mysteriously in the town and its inhabitants. She had the silken

movements of the panther, going smoothly, silently to and fro, and the

same indirect, oblique methods as the townsfolk, screening, like them,

secret purposes of her own—purposes that I was sure had me for

their objective. She kept me, to my terror and delight, ceaselessly

under observation, yet so carelessly, so consummately, that another man

less sensitive, if I may say so”—he made a deprecating gesture—”or

less prepared by what had gone before, would never have noticed it at

all. She was always still, always reposeful, yet she seemed to be

everywhere at once, so that I never could escape from her. I was

continually meeting the stare and laughter of her great eyes, in the

corners of the rooms, in the passages, calmly looking at me through the

windows, or in the busiest parts of the public streets.”

Their intimacy, it seems, grew very rapidly after

this first encounter which had so violently disturbed the little man’s

equilibrium. He was naturally very prim, and prim folk live mostly in

so small a world that anything violently unusual may shake them clean

out of it, and they therefore instinctively distrust originality. But

Vezin began to forget his primness after awhile. The girl was always

modestly behaved, and as her mother’s representative she naturally had

to do with the guests in the hotel. It was not out of the way that a

spirit of camaraderie should spring up. Besides, she was young, she was

charmingly pretty, she was French, and—she obviously liked him.

At the same time, there was something

indescribable—a certain indefinable atmosphere of other places, other

times—that made him try hard to remain on his guard, and sometimes

made him catch his breath with a sudden start. It was all rather like a

delirious dream, half delight, half dread, he confided in a whisper to

Dr. Silence; and more than once he hardly knew quite what he was doing

or saying, as though he were driven forward by impulses he scarcely

recognised as his own.

And though the thought of leaving presented itself

again and again to his mind, it was each time with less insistence, so

that he stayed on from day to day, becoming more and more a part of the

sleepy life of this dreamy mediaeval town, losing more and more of his

recognisable personality. Soon, he felt, the Curtain within would roll

up with an awful rush, and he would find himself suddenly admitted into

the secret purposes of the hidden life that lay behind it all. Only, by

that time, he would have become transformed into an entirely different

being.

And, meanwhile, he noticed various little signs of

the intention to make his stay attractive to him: flowers in his

bedroom, a more comfortable arm-chair in the corner, and even special

little extra dishes on his private table in the dining-room.

Conversations, too, with “Mademoiselle Use” became more and more

frequent and pleasant, and although they seldom travelled beyond the

weather, or the details of the town, the girl, he noticed, was never in

a hurry to bring them to an end, and often contrived to interject

little odd sentences that he never properly understood, yet felt to be

significant.

And it was these stray remarks, full of a meaning

that evaded him, that pointed to some hidden purpose of her own and

made him feel uneasy. They all had to do, he felt sure, with reasons

for his staying on in the town indefinitely.

“And has M’sieur not even yet come to a decision?”

she said softly in his ear, sitting beside him in the sunny yard before dejeuner, the acquaintance having progressed with significant

rapidity. “Because, if it’s so difficult, we must all try together to

help him!”

The question startled him, following upon his own

thoughts.