The

encounter in the passage-way had changed all that. The strange perfume

of it still hung about him, bemusing his heart and mind. For he knew

that it was a girl who had passed him, a girl’s face that his fingers

had brushed in the darkness, and he felt in some extraordinary way as

though he had been actually kissed by her, kissed full upon the lips.

Trembling, he sat upon the sofa by the window and

struggled to collect his thoughts. He was utterly unable to understand

how the mere passing of a girl in the darkness of a narrow passage-way

could communicate so electric a thrill to his whole being that he still

shook with the sweetness of it. Yet, there it was! And he found it as

useless to deny as to attempt analysis. Some ancient fire had entered

his veins, and now ran coursing through his blood; and that he was

forty-five instead of twenty did not matter one little jot. Out of all

the inner turmoil and confusion emerged the one salient fact that the

mere atmosphere, the merest casual touch, of this girl, unseen, unknown

in the darkness, had been sufficient to stir dormant fires in the

centre of his heart, and rouse his whole being from a state of feeble

sluggishness to one of tearing and tumultuous excitement.

After a time, however, the number of Vezin’s years

began to assert their cumulative power; he grew calmer, and when a

knock came at length upon his door and he heard the waiter’s voice

suggesting that dinner was nearly over, he pulled himself together and

slowly made his way downstairs into the dining-room.

Every one looked up as he entered, for he was very

late, but he took his customary seat in the far corner and began to

eat. The trepidation was still in his nerves, but the fact that he had

passed through the courtyard and hall without catching sight of a

petticoat served to calm him a little. He ate so fast that he had

almost caught up with the current stage of the table d’h6te, when a

slight commotion in the room drew his attention.

His chair was so placed that the door and the

greater portion of the long salle a manger were behind him, yet

it was not necessary to turn round to know that the same person he had

passed in the dark passage had now come into the room. He felt the

presence long before he heard or saw any one. Then he became aware that

the old men, the only other guests, were rising one by one in their

places, and exchanging greetings with some one who passed among them

from table to table. And when at length he turned with his heart

beating furiously to ascertain for himself, he saw the form of a young

girl, lithe and slim, moving down the centre of the room and making

straight for his own table in the corner. She moved wonderfully, with

sinuous grace, like a young panther, and her approach filled him with

such delicious bewilderment that he was utterly unable to tell at first

what her face was like, or discover what it was about the whole

presentment of the creature that filled him anew with trepidation and

delight.

“Ah, Ma’mselle est de retour!” he heard the old

waiter murmur at his side, and he was just able to take in that she was

the daughter of the proprietress, when she was upon him, and he heard

her voice. She was addressing him. Something of red lips he saw and

laughing white teeth, and stray wisps of fine dark hair about the

temples; but all the rest was a dream in which his own emotion rose

like a thick cloud before his eyes and prevented his seeing accurately,

or knowing exactly what he did. He was aware that she greeted him with

a charming little bow; that her beautiful large eyes looked searchingly

into his own; that the perfume he had noticed in the dark passage again

assailed his nostrils, and that she was bending a little towards him

and leaning with one hand on the table at this side. She was quite

close to him—that was the chief thing he knew—explaining that she had

been asking after the comfort of her mother’s guests, and now was

introducing herself to the latest arrival—himself.

“M’sieur has already been here a few days,” he heard

the waiter say; and then her own voice, sweet as singing, replied—

“Ah, but M’sieur is not going to leave us just yet,

I hope. My mother is too old to look after the comfort of our guests

properly, but now I am here I will remedy all that.” She laughed

deliciously. “M’sieur shall be well looked after.”

Vezin, struggling with his emotion and desire to be

polite, half rose to acknowledge the pretty speech, and to stammer some

sort of reply, but as he did so his hand by chance touched her own that

was resting upon the table, and a shock that was for all the world like

a shock of electricity, passed from her skin into his body. His soul

wavered and shook deep within him. He caught her eyes fixed upon his

own with a look of most curious intentness, and the next moment he knew

that he had sat down wordless again on his chair, that the girl was

already halfway across the room, and that he was trying to eat his

salad with a dessert-spoon and a knife.

Longing for her return, and yet dreading it, he

gulped down the remainder of his dinner, and then went at once to his

bedroom to be alone with his thoughts. This time the passages were

lighted, and he suffered no exciting contretemps; yet the winding

corridor was dim with shadows, and the last portion, from the bend of

the walls onwards, seemed longer than he had ever known it. It ran

downhill like the pathway on a mountain side, and as he tiptoed softly

down it he felt that by rights it ought to have led him clean out of

the house into the heart of a great forest. The world was singing with

him. Strange fancies filled his brain, and once in the room, with the

door securely locked, he did not light the candles, but sat by the open

window thinking long, long thoughts that came unbidden in troops to his

mind.

IV

This part of the story he told to Dr. Silence, without special

coaxing, it is true, yet with much stammering embarrassment. He could

not in the least understand, he said, how the girl had managed to

affect him so profoundly, and even before he had set eyes upon her. For

her mere proximity in the darkness had been sufficient to set him on

fire. He knew nothing of enchantments, and for years had been a

stranger to anything approaching tender relations with any member of

the opposite sex, for he was encased in shyness, and realised his

overwhelming defects only too well. Yet this bewitching young creature

came to him deliberately.