She turned her head and looked at him through half-closed eyelids, her growing inner excitement betraying itself by the faint colour that ran like a shadow across her face.

“It seems to me,”—­he faltered oddly under her gaze—­“that I have some right to know—­”

Suddenly she opened her eyes to the full.  “You love me, then?” she asked softly.

“I swear,” he cried impetuously, moved as by the force of a rising tide, “I never felt before—­I have never known any other girl who—­”

“Then you have the right to know,” she calmly interrupted his confused confession, “for love shares all secrets.”

She paused, and a thrill like fire ran swiftly through him.  Her words lifted him off the earth, and he felt a radiant happiness, followed almost the same instant in horrible contrast by the thought of death.  He became aware that she had turned her eyes upon his own and was speaking again.

“The real life I speak of,” she whispered, “is the old, old life within, the life of long ago, the life to which you, too, once belonged, and to which you still belong.”

A faint wave of memory troubled the deeps of his soul as her low voice sank into him.  What she was saying he knew instinctively to be true, even though he could not as yet understand its full purport.  His present life seemed slipping from him as he listened, merging his personality in one that was far older and greater.  It was this loss of his present self that brought to him the thought of death.

“You came here,” she went on, “with the purpose of seeking it, and the people felt your presence and are waiting to know what you decide, whether you will leave them without having found it, or whether—­”

Her eyes remained fixed upon his own, but her face began to change, growing larger and darker with an expression of age.

“It is their thoughts constantly playing about your soul that makes you feel they watch you.  They do not watch you with their eyes.  The purposes of their inner life are calling to you, seeking to claim you.  You were all part of the same life long, long ago, and now they want you back again among them.”

Vezin’s timid heart sank with dread as he listened; but the girl’s eyes held him with a net of joy so that he had no wish to escape.  She fascinated him, as it were, clean out of his normal self.

“Alone, however, the people could never have caught and held you,” she resumed.  “The motive force was not strong enough; it has faded through all these years.  But I”—­she paused a moment and looked at him with complete confidence in her splendid eyes—­“I possess the spell to conquer you and hold you:  the spell of old love.  I can win you back again and make you live the old life with me, for the force of the ancient tie between us, if I choose to use it, is irresistible.  And I do choose to use it.  I still want you.  And you, dear soul of my dim past”—­she pressed closer to him so that her breath passed across his eyes, and her voice positively sang—­“I mean to have you, for you love me and are utterly at my mercy.”