e. A strong
light shone in his hard, intelligent eyes, eyes surely endowed with the
power to pierce into hidden places. Presently he put the paper down. So
that was it! That was why Beryl had been so startled when he touched her
in the restaurant!

He got up and walked to the easel on which was the new sketch for
Arabian's portrait, stood before it and looked at it for a very long
time. And all the time he stood there what he had just read was in his
mind. Fear! The fascination of fear! There were women who could only
love what they could also fear. Perhaps Beryl was one of them. Perhaps
underneath all her audacity, her self-possession, her "damned cheek,"
her abnormal vanity, there was the thing that could shrink, and quiver,
and love the brute.

Was that her secret? And his? Arabian's?

Garstin threw himself down presently and looked at the paper again.
The article which he felt sure had gripped Miss Van Tuyn's attention
described a new play which had just made a sensation in Paris. A woman,
apparently courageous almost to hardness, self-engrossed, beautiful
and cold, became in this play fascinated by a man about whom she knew
nothing, whom she did not understand, who was not in her circle of
society, who knew none of her friends, who came from she knew not where.
Her instinct hinted to her that there was in him something abominable.
She distrusted him. She was even afraid of him. But he made an enormous
impression upon her. And she said of him to a man who warned her against
him, "But he means a great deal to me and other men mean little or
nothing. There is something in him which speaks to me and in others
there is nothing but silence. There is something in him which leads me
along a path and others leave me standing where I am."

Eventually, against the warning of her own instinct, and, as it were, in
spite of herself, she gave herself up to the man, and after a very short
association with him--only a few days--he strangled her. She had a long
and very beautiful neck. Hidden in him was a homicidal tendency.
Her throat had drawn his hands, and, behind his hands, him. And she?
Apparently she had been drawn to the murderer hidden in him, to the
strong, ruthless, terribly intent, crouching thing that wanted to
destroy her.

As the writer of the article pointed out, the play was a Grand Guignol
piece produced away from its proper environment. It was called _The Lure
of Destruction_.

How Beryl had started when a