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. 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.