CHAPTER XIII

If it had not been for the lurking hope of some fresh exciting
experience with a woman, he would have been unconscionably lonely. As it
was, this thought with him--quite as the confirmed drunkard's thought of
whiskey--buoyed him up, kept him from despairing utterly, gave his mind
the only diversion it had from the ever present thought of failure. If
by chance he should meet some truly beautiful girl, gay, enticing, who
would fall in love with him! that would be happiness. Only, Angela was
constantly watching him these days and, besides, more girls would simply
mean that his condition would be aggravated. Yet so powerful was the
illusion of desire, the sheer animal magnetism of beauty, that when it
came near him in the form of a lovely girl of his own temperamental
inclinations he could not resist it. One look into an inviting eye, one
glance at a face whose outlines were soft and delicate--full of that
subtle suggestion of youth and health which is so characteristic of
girlhood--and the spell was cast. It was as though the very form of the
face, without will or intention on the part of the possessor, acted
hypnotically upon its beholder. The Arabians believed in the magic power
of the word Abracadabra to cast a spell. For Eugene the form of a
woman's face and body was quite as powerful.

While he and Angela were in Alexandria from February to May, he met one
night at his sister's house a girl who, from the point of view of the
beauty which he admired and to which he was so susceptible, was
extremely hypnotic, and who for the ease and convenience of a flirtation
was very favorably situated. She was the daughter of a traveling man,
George Roth by name, whose wife, the child's mother, was dead, but who
lived with his sister in an old tree-shaded house on the edge of Green
Lake not far from the spot where Eugene had once attempted to caress his
first love, Stella Appleton. Frieda was the girl's name. She was
extremely attractive, not more than eighteen years of age, with large,
clear, blue eyes, a wealth of yellowish-brown hair and a plump but
shapely figure. She was a graduate of the local high school, well
developed for her years, bright, rosy-cheeked, vivacious and with a
great deal of natural intelligence which attracted the attention of
Eugene at once. Normally he was extremely fond of a natural, cheerful,
laughing disposition. In his present state he was abnormally so. This
girl and her foster mothe