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 dis