mme veut, Dieu le veut_," I laughed.

"_Eh bien, je le veux_," she said with an odd expression in her eyes
which burned golden. They fascinated me, held mine. For some seconds
neither of us moved. Just consider the picture. There among the cushions
of her chair she sprawled beneath the light of a shaded lamp on the
further side, and in front of the leaping flames, a great, powerful,
sinuous creature of sweeping curves, clad in a clinging brown dress, her
head crowned with superb bronze hair, two warm arms bare to the elbow,
at which the sleeve ended in coffee-coloured lace falling over the side
of the chair, and her leopard eyes fixed on me. About her still hung the
echo of her last words spoken in deep tones whose register belongs less
to human habitations than to the jungle. And from her emanated like
a captivating odour--but it was not an odour--a strange magnetic
influence.

I have done my best to write her down in my mind a commonplace, vulgar,
good-natured mountebank. But I can do so no longer.

There is something deep down in the soul of Lola Brandt which sets her
apart from the kindly race of womankind; whether it is the devil or
a touch of pre-Adamite splendour or an ancestral catamount, I make
no attempt to determine. At any rate, she is too grand a creature to
fritter her life away on a statistic-hunting and pheasant-shooting young
Briton like Dale Kynnersley. He would never begin to understand her. I
will save her from Dale for her own sake.

All this, ladies and gentlemen, because her eyes fascinated me, and
caused me to hold my breath, and made my heart beat.

And will Captain Vauvenarde understand her? Of course he won't. But then
he is her husband, and husbands are notoriously and _cum privilegio_
dunder-headed. I make no pretensions to understand her, but as I am
neither her lover nor her husband it does not matter. She says nothing
diabolical or eerie or fantastic or feline or pre-Adamite or uncanny or
spiritual; and yet she _is_, in a queer, indescribable way, all these
things.

"_Je le veux_," she said, and we drank in each other's souls, or
gaped at each other like a pair of idiots just as you please. I had a
horrible, yet pleasurable consciousness that she had gripped hold of my
nerves of volition. She was willing me to live. I was a puppet in her
hands like the wild tom-cat. At that moment I declare I could have
purred and rubbed my head against her knee. I would have done anything
she bade