or the fearful
results which might follow. Both knew it was dangerous, and liked it the
better for that. There was a long silence. The game was opening on a wider
scale than either had ever played before.

"Do you believe in affinities?" asked the devil, through the man's voice.

The woman colored and showed she understood his deeper meaning. Her eyes
drooped for just the shade of an instant, and then she looked up and faced
him saucily, provokingly:

"Why?"

He admired her with his gaze, and waited, lazily watching the color play
in her cheeks.

"Do you need to ask why?" he said at last, looking at her significantly.
"I knew that you were my affinity the moment I laid my eyes upon you, and
I hoped you felt the same. But perhaps I was mistaken." He searched her
face.

She kept her eyes upon his, returning their full gaze, as if to hold it
from going too deep into her soul.

"I did not say you were mistaken, did I?" said the rosy lips coquettishly,
and Kate drooped her long lashes till they fell in becoming sweeps over
her burning cheeks.

Something in the curve of cheek and chin, and sweep of dark lash over
velvet skin, reminded him of her sister. It was so she had sat, though
utterly unconscious, while he had been singing, when there had come over
him that overwhelming desire to kiss her. If he should kiss this fair lady
would she slap him in the face and run into the garden? He thought not.
Still, she was brought up by the same father and mother in all likelihood,
and it was well to go slow. He reached forward, drawing his chair a little
nearer to her, and then boldly took one of her small unresisting hands,
gently, that he might not frighten her, and smoothed it thoughtfully
between his own. He held it in a close grasp and looked into her face
again, she meanwhile watching her hand amusedly, as though it were
something apart from herself, a sort of distant possession, for which she
was in no wise responsible.

"I feel that you belong to me," he said boldly looking into her eyes with
a languishing gaze. "I have known it from the first moment."

Kate let her hand lie in his as if she liked it, but she said:

"And what makes you think that, most audacious sir? Did you not know that
I am married?" Then she swept her gaze up provokingly at him again and
smiled, showing her dainty, treacherous, little teeth. She was so
bewitchingly pretty and tempting then that he had a mind to kiss her on
the spot, but a tho