ee her crumble away. I have never seen
body and spirit in such perfect accord. Describe her verse, as the
critics have described it, as sublimated and spiritual, and you have
described her body. It seemed to partake of her soul, to have analogous
attributes, and to link it to life with the slenderest of chains.
Indeed, she trod the earth lightly, and in her constitution there was
little of the robust clay.

She was in striking contrast to Wolf Larsen. Each was nothing that the
other was, everything that the other was not. I noted them walking the
deck together one morning, and I likened them to the extreme ends of the
human ladder of evolution--the one the culmination of all savagery, the
other the finished product of the finest civilization. True, Wolf Larsen
possessed intellect to an unusual degree, but it was directed solely to
the exercise of his savage instincts and made him but the more formidable
a savage. He was splendidly muscled, a heavy man, and though he strode
with the certitude and directness of the physical man, there was nothing
heavy about his stride. The jungle and the wilderness lurked in the
uplift and downput of his feet. He was cat-footed, and lithe, and
strong, always strong. I likened him to some great tiger, a beast of
prowess and prey. He looked it, and the piercing glitter that arose at
times in his eyes was the same piercing glitter I had observed in the
eyes of caged leopards and other preying creatures of the wild.

But this day, as I noted them pacing up and down, I saw that it was she
who terminated the walk. They came up to where I was standing by the
entrance to the companion-way. Though she betrayed it by no outward
sign, I felt, somehow, that she was greatly perturbed. She made some
idle remark, looking at me, and laughed lightly enough; but I saw her
eyes return to his, involuntarily, as though fascinated; then they fell,
but not swiftly enough to veil the rush of terror that filled them.

It was in his eyes that I saw the cause of her perturbation. Ordinarily
grey and cold and harsh, they were now warm and soft and golden, and all
a-dance with tiny lights that dimmed and faded, or welled up till the
full orbs were flooded with a glowing radiance. Perhaps it was to this
that the golden colour was due; but golden his eyes were, enticing and
masterful, at the same time luring and compelling, and speaking a demand
and clamour of the blood which no woman, much less Maud