ure,
of the hostile.

Sepia's eyes were her great power. She knew the laws of mortar-practice
in that kind as well as any officer of engineers those of projectiles.
There was something about her engines which it were vain to attempt to
describe. Their lightest glance was a thing not to be trifled with, and
their gaze a thing hardly to be withstood. Sustained and without hurt
defied, it could hardly be by man of woman born. They were large, but
no fool would be taken with mere size. They were as dark as ever eyes
of woman, but our older poets delighted in eyes as gray as glass:
certainly not in their darkness lay their peculiar witchery. They were
grandly proportioned, neither almond-shaped nor round, neither
prominent nor deep-set; but even shape by itself is not much. If I go
on to say they were luminous, plainly there the danger begins. Sepia's
eyes, I confess, were not lords of the deepest light--for she was not
true; but neither was theirs a surface light, generated of merely
physical causes: through them, concentrating her will upon their
utterance, she could establish a psychical contact with _almost_ any
man she chose. Their power was an evil, selfish shadow of original,
universal love. By them she could produce at once, in the man on whom
she turned their play, a sense as it were of some primordial, fatal
affinity between her and him--of an aboriginal understanding, the rare
possession of but a few of the pairs made male and female. Into those
eyes she would call up her soul, and there make it sit, flashing light,
in gleams and sparkles, shoots and coruscations--not from great, black
pupils alone--to whose size there were who said the suicidal belladonna
lent its aid--but from great, dark irids as well--nay, from eyeballs,
eyelashes, and eyelids, as from spiritual catapult or culverin, would
she dart the lightnings of her present soul, invading with influence as
irresistible as subtile the soul of the man she chose to assail, who,
thenceforward, for a season, if he were such as she took him for,
scarce had choice but be her slave. She seldom exerted their full
force, however, without some further motive than mere desire to
captivate. There are women who fly their falcons at any game, little
birds and all; but Sepia did not so waste herself: her quarry must be
worth her hunt: she must either love him or need him. _Love!_ did I
say? Alas! if ever holy word was put to unholy use, _love_ is that
word! When Diana go