And this girl was surely the

high-priestess of it all, the chief instrument of its accomplishment.

New thoughts, with new interpretations, flooded his mind as she walked

beside him through the winding streets, while the picturesque old

gabled town, softly coloured in the sunset, had never appeared to him

so wholly wonderful and seductive.

And only one curious incident came to disturb and

puzzle him, slight in itself, but utterly inexplicable, bringing white

terror into the child’s face and a scream to her laughing lips. He had

merely pointed to a column of blue smoke that rose from the burning

autumn leaves and made a picture against the red roofs, and had then

run to the wall and called her to his side to watch the flames shooting

here and there through the heap of rubbish. Yet, at the sight of it, as

though taken by surprise, her face had altered dreadfully, and she had

turned and run like the wind, calling out wild sentences to him as she

ran, of which he had not understood a single word, except that the fire

apparently frightened her, and she wanted to get quickly away from it,

and to get him away too.

Yet five minutes later she was as calm and happy again

as though nothing had happened to alarm or waken troubled thoughts in

her, and they had both forgotten the incident.

They were leaning over the ruined ramparts together

listening to the weird music of the band as he had heard it the first

day of his arrival. It moved him again profoundly as it had done

before, and somehow he managed to find his tongue and his best French.

The girl leaned across the stones close beside him. No one was about.

Driven by some remorseless engine within he began to stammer

something—he hardly knew what—of his strange admiration for her.

Almost at the first word she sprang lightly off the wall and came up

smiling in front of him, just touching his knees as he sat there. She

was hatless as usual, and the sun caught her hair and one side of her

cheek and throat.

“Oh, I’m so glad!” she cried, clapping her little

hands softly in his face, “so very glad, because that means that if you

like me you must also like what I do, and what I belong to.”

Already he regretted bitterly having lost control of

himself. Something in the phrasing of her sentence chilled him. He knew

the fear of embarking upon an unknown and dangerous sea.

“You will take part in our real life, I mean,” she

added softly, with an indescribable coaxing of manner, as though she

noticed his shrinking. “You will come back to us.”

Already this slip of a child seemed to dominate him;

he felt her power coming over him more and more; something emanated

from her that stole over his senses and made him aware that her

personality, for all its simple grace, held forces that were stately,

imposing, august. He saw her again moving through smoke and flame amid

broken and tempestuous scenery, alarmingly strong, her terrible mother

by her side. Dimly this shone through her smile and appearance of

charming innocence.

“You will, I know,” she repeated, holding him with her eyes.

They were quite alone up there on the ramparts, and

the sensation that she was overmastering him stirred a wild

sensuousness in his blood. The mingled abandon and reserve in her

attracted him furiously, and all of him that was man rose up and

resisted the creeping influence, at the same time acclaiming it with

the full delight of his forgotten youth. An irresistible desire came to

him to question her, to summon what still remained to him of his own

little personality in an effort to retain the right to his normal self.

The girl had grown quiet again, and was now leaning

on the broad wall close beside him, gazing out across the darkening

plain, her elbows on the coping, motionless as a figure carved in

stone. He took his courage in both hands.

“Tell me, Use,” he said, unconsciously

imitating her own purring softness of voice, yet aware that he was

utterly in earnest, “what is the meaning of this town, and what is this

real life you speak of? And why is it that the people watch me from

morning to night? Tell me what it all means? And, tell me,” he added

more quickly with passion in his voice, “what you really are—yourself?”

She turned her head and looked at him through

half-closed eyelids, her growing inner excitement betraying itself by

the faint colour that ran like a shadow across her face.

“It seems to me,”—he faltered oddly under her

gaze—”that I have some right to know–-“

Suddenly she opened her eyes to the full. “You love

me, then?” she asked softly.

“I swear,” he cried impetuously, moved as by the

force of a rising tide, “I never felt before—I have never known any

other girl who—”

“Then you have the right to know,” she calmly

interrupted his confused confession, “for love shares all secrets.”

She paused, and a thrill like fire ran swiftly

through him. Her words lifted him off the earth, and he felt a radiant

happiness, followed almost the same instant in horrible contrast by the

thought of death. He became aware that she had turned her eyes upon his

own and was speaking again.

“The real life I speak of,” she whispered, “is the

old, old life within, the life of long ago, the life to which you, too,

once belonged, and to which you still belong.”

A faint wave of memory troubled the deeps of his

soul as her low voice sank into him. What she was saying he knew

instinctively to be true, even though he could not as yet understand

its full purport. His present life seemed slipping from him as he

listened, merging his personality in one that was far older and

greater. It was this loss of his present self that brought to him the

thought of death.

“You came here,” she went on, “with the purpose of

seeking it, and the people felt your presence and are waiting to know

what you decide, whether you will leave them without having found it,

or whether–-“

Her eyes remained fixed upon his own, but her face

began to change, growing larger and darker with an expression of age.

“It is their thoughts constantly playing about your

soul that makes you feel they watch you. They do not watch you with

their eyes. The purposes of their inner life are calling to you,

seeking to claim you. You were all part of the same life long, long

ago, and now they want you back again among them.”

Vezin’s timid heart sank with dread as he listened;

but the girl’s eyes held him with a net of joy so that he had no wish

to escape. She fascinated him, as it were, clean out of his normal self.

“Alone, however, the people could never have caught

and held you,” she resumed. “The motive force was not strong enough; it

has faded through all these years.