And
why is it that the people watch me from morning to night? Tell me what
it all means? And, tell me,” he added more quickly with passion in his
voice, “what you really are--yourself?”

She turned her head and looked at him through half-closed eyelids, her
growing inner excitement betraying itself by the faint colour that ran
like a shadow across her face. “It seems to me,”--he faltered oddly under her gaze--“that I have some
right to know----”

Suddenly she opened her eyes to the full. “You love me, then?” she
asked softly. “I swear,” he cried impetuously, moved as by the force of a rising
tide, “I never felt before--I have never known any other girl who----”

“Then you _have_ the right to know,” she calmly interrupted his
confused confession; “for love shares all secrets.”

She paused, and a thrill like fire ran swiftly through him. Her words
lifted him off the earth, and he felt a radiant happiness, followed
almost the same instant in horrible contrast by the thought of death. He became aware that she had turned her eyes upon his own and was
speaking again. “The real life I speak of,” she whispered, “is the old, old life
within, the life of long ago, the life to which you, too, once
belonged, and to which you still belong.”

A faint wave of memory troubled the deeps of his soul as her low
voice sank into him. What she was saying he knew instinctively to be
true, even though he could not as yet understand its full purport. His present life seemed slipping from him as he listened, merging his
personality in one that was far older and greater. It was this loss of
his present self that brought to him the thought of death. “You came here,” she went on, “with the purpose of seeking it, and the
people felt your presence and are waiting to know what you decide,
whether you will leave them without having found it, or whether----”

Her eyes remained fixed upon his own, but her face began to change,
growing larger and darker with an expression of age. “It is their thoughts constantly playing about your soul that makes
you feel they watch you. They do not watch you with their eyes. The
purposes of their inner life are calling to you, seeking to claim you. You were all part of the same life long, long ago, and now they want
you back again among them.”

Vezin’s timid heart sank with dread as he listened; but the girl’s
eyes held him with a net of joy so that he had no wish to escape. She
fascinated him, as it were, clean out of his normal self. “Alone, however, the people could never have caught and held you,”
she resumed. “The motive force was not strong enough; it has faded
through all these years. But I”--she paused a moment and looked at him
with complete confidence in her splendid eyes--“I possess the spell to
conquer you and hold you: the spell of old love. I can win you back
again and make you live the old life with me, for the force of the
ancient tie between us, if I choose to use it, is irresistible. And
I do choose to use it I still want you. And you, dear soul of my dim
past”--she pressed closer to him so that her breath passed across his
eyes, and her voice positively sang--“I mean to have you, for you love
me and are utterly at my mercy.”

Vezin heard, and yet did not hear; understood, yet did not understand. He had passed into a condition of exaltation. The world was beneath his
feet, made of music and flowers, and he was flying somewhere far above
it through the sunshine of pure delight. He was breathless and giddy
with the wonder of her words. They intoxicated him. And, still, the
terror of it all, the dreadful thought of death, pressed ever behind
her sentences. For flames shot through her voice out of black smoke and
licked at his soul. And they communicated with one another, it seemed to him, by a process
of swift telepathy, for his French could never have compassed all he
said to her. Yet she understood perfectly, and what she said to him was
like the recital of verses long since known. And the mingled pain and
sweetness of it as he listened were almost more than his little soul
could hold. “Yet I came here wholly by chance----” he heard himself saying. “No,” she cried with passion, “you came here because I called to you. I
have called to you for years, and you came with the whole force of the
past behind you. You had to come, for I own you, and I claim you.”

She rose again and moved closer, looking at him with a certain
insolence in the face--the insolence of power. The sun had set behind the towers of the old cathedral and the darkness
rose up from the plain and enveloped them. The music of the band had
ceased. The leaves of the plane trees hung motionless, but the chill
of the autumn evening rose about them and made Vezin shiver. There
was no sound but the sound of their voices and the occasional soft
rustle of the girl’s dress. He could hear the blood rushing in his
ears. He scarcely realised where he was or what he was doing. Some
terrible magic of the imagination drew him deeply down into the tombs
of his own being, telling him in no unfaltering voice that her words
shadowed forth the truth. And this simple little French maid, speaking
beside him with so strange authority, he saw curiously alter into quite
another being. As he stared into her eyes, the picture in his mind grew
and lived, dressing itself vividly to his inner vision with a degree
of reality he was compelled to acknowledge. As once before, he saw her
tall and stately, moving through wild and broken scenery of forests and
mountain caverns, the glare of flames behind her head and clouds of
shifting smoke about her feet. Dark leaves encircled her hair, flying
loosely in the wind, and her limbs shone through the merest rags of
clothing. Others were about her too, and ardent eyes on all sides cast
delirious glances upon her, but her own eyes were always for One only,
one whom she held by the hand. For she was leading the dance in some
tempestuous orgy to the music of chanting voices, and the dance she led
circled about a great and awful Figure on a throne, brooding over the
scene through lurid vapours, while innumerable other wild faces and
forms crowded furiously about her in the dance. But the one she held by
the hand he knew to be himself, and the monstrous shape upon the throne
he knew to be her mother. The vision rose within him, rushing to him down the long years
of buried time, crying aloud to him with the voice of memory
reawakened.... And then the scene faded away and he saw the clear
circle of the girl’s eyes gazing steadfastly into his own, and she
became once more the pretty little daughter of the innkeeper, and he
found his voice again. “And you,” he whispered tremblingly--“you child of visions and
enchantment, how is it that you so bewitch me that I loved you even
before I saw?”

She drew herself up beside him with an air of rare dignity. “The call of the Past,” she said; “and besides,” she added proudly, “in
the real life I am a princess----”

“A princess!” he cried.