Longing for her return, and yet dreading it, he gulped down the remainder of his dinner, and then went at once to his bedroom to be alone with his thoughts.  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.”