ndelabra; he touched them with the
match-flame, they flickered, spat, rose to a steady glow. In the new
light the room looked warmer, more in touch with human things and,
moving with the inevitableness of a pendulum, his mind swung to a
definite desire.

Impulse seized him; questions, doubts, fears were submerged; trembling
to a loosed emotion, he ran across the room and bent over his narrow
bed.

He was alone now; alone in the absolutely primal sense of the word, when
the individual ceases to act even to himself. The instinct he had denied
was dominating him, and he was yielding with a sense of intoxication.

With hands that shook in excitement, he raised the mattress and,
searching beneath, drew forth an object--a flat packet, bound and
sealed--the packet, in fine, that had lain so deep and snug in the
pocket of his overcoat on the night of his entry into Paris.

His hand--his whole body--was trembling as he brought it to light and
walked back to the dressing-table.

There, he pulled forward a chair and sat down before the mirror. For a
full minute he sat, as if enchained, then at length--in obedience to the
force that was dominating him--his fingers crept under the string, there
came to the ear a faint, sharp crackle, and the seals broke.

The seals broke, a gasp slipped from between his parted lips, and in his
hands lay the symbol of all the imaginings, all the pretty mockery
wherewith he purported to cheat nature.

It lay in his hands--a simple thing, potent as simple things ever are.
No rare jewel, no state paper, merely the long, thick strands of a
woman's hair.

The paper fell away, and he lifted it shakingly to the light.
Stiff-coiled from its long imprisonment, it unwound slowly, allowing the
candle-light to filch strange hues from its dark length--glints of
bronze, tinges of copper-color that gleamed elusively from the one end,
where it had been roughly clipped from the head, to the other, where it
still curled and twisted into little tendrils like a living thing.

A woman's hair! A weapon old as time--as light, as destructible, as
possessed of subtle powers as woman herself. Strand upon strand, he drew
it out, following the glints of light with dazed, questioning eyes.

A woman's hair! A woman's hair, woven to blind men's eyes!

Max leaned forward, quivering to a new impulse, and, raising the heavy
coils, twisted them swiftly about his head. With the action, the blood
rushed into his cheeks, a f