Look into my eyes," she said softly. "Look deep."

He looked and though to him were women unread books, at last a slow
flush crept up into his cheeks. For now neither he nor any other man
could have failed to understand the silent speech of Zoraida's eyes.
It was as though she invited him not so much to look into her eyes as
through them and on, deep into her heart; as though these were gates,
open to him, through which he might glimpse paradise. Zoraida, her
look clinging to his passionately, was seeking to offer the final
argument. The case would have not been plainer had she whispered with
her lips: "I, even I, Zoraida, love you! You shall be my master; I
your willing slave. What you will, I will also. My beauty shall be
yours; my wealth, my estate, my ambitions, my power, all those shall be
my lord's. Of a kingdom which shall be built you shall be king. You
shall go far, you shall climb high. All because I, Zoraida, love you!"

She stood there watching him, her eyes burning into his. In her own
mind were pictures made, pictures of pride and power and, as a mirror
reflects the scene before it, so for a little did Jim Kendric's mind
hold an image of the thing in Zoraida's. He felt her influence upon
him; he felt that odd stirring of the blood; he stared back into her
eyes like a man bewildered as pictures rose and swept magnificently by.
He saw the red of her parted lips and heard her soft breathing; for a
certain length of time--long or short he had little conception--he was
motionless and speechless under her spell.

He stirred restlessly. Those visions conjured up within him, either by
Zoraida's previous words and what had gone before or by the subtle
workings of her mind now, were not unbroken. He thought of Twisty
Barlow. Barlow had gone to her at the border town hotel; from his own
experiences with her Kendric thought that he could imagine how she
stood before the sailor, how she talked with him and looked at him, how
in the first small point she won over him. He thought of an ancient
tale of Circe and the swine. Was he a free man, a man's man or was he
a woman's plaything? . . . It flashed over him again that it might be
that Zoraida was mad. Even now, that he seemed to be reading her
inmost soul, was she but playing the siren to his imaginings? Was this
some barbaric whim of hers or was she, for the once, sincere? While
appearing to be all yielding softness, was she but playing a game?
W