foot upon the stone and took hold of the close-clinging shrub.  In this way he turned a sharp angle of the rock and found himself on a natural platform, which lay in front of one of the wider fissures,—­whether the mouth of a cavern or not he could not yet tell.  A flat stone made an easy seat, upon which he sat down, as he was very glad to do, and looked mechanically about him.  A small fragment splintered from the rock was at his feet.  He took it and threw it down the declivity a little below where he sat.  He looked about for a stem or a straw of some kind to bite upon,—­a country-instinct,—­relic, no doubt, of the old vegetable-feeding habits of Eden.  Is that a stem or a straw?  He picked it up.  It was a hair-pin.

To say that Mr. Langdon had a strange sort of thrill shoot through him at the sight of this harmless little implement would be a statement not at variance with the fact of the case.  That smooth stone had been often trodden, and by what foot he could not doubt.  He rose up from his seat to look round for other signs of a woman’s visits.  What if there is a cavern here, where she has a retreat, fitted up, perhaps, as anchorites fitted their cells,—­nay, it may be, carpeted and mirrored, and with one of those tiger-skins for a couch, such as they, say the girl loves to lie on?  Let us look, at any rate.

Mr. Bernard walked to the mouth of the cavern or fissure and looked into it.  His look was met by the glitter of two diamond eyes, small, sharp, cold, shining out of the darkness, but gliding with a smooth, steady motion towards the light, and himself.  He stood fixed, struck dumb, staring back into them with dilating pupils and sudden numbness of fear that cannot move, as in the terror of dreams.  The two sparks of light came forward until they grew to circles of flame, and all at once lifted themselves up as if in angry surprise.  Then for the first time thrilled in Mr. Bernard’s ears the dreadful sound that nothing which breathes, be it man or brute, can hear unmoved,—­the long, loud, stinging whirr, as the huge, thick bodied reptile shook his many-jointed rattle and adjusted his loops for the fatal stroke.  His eyes were drawn as with magnets toward the circles of flame.  His ears rung as in the overture to the swooning dream of chloroform.  Nature was before man with her anaesthetics:  the cat’s first shake stupefies the mouse; the lion’s first shake deadens the man’s fear and feeling; and the crotalus paralyzes before he strikes.  He waited as in a trance,—­waited as one that longs to have the blow fall, and all over, as the man who shall be in two pieces in a second waits for the axe to drop.  But while he looked straight into the flaming eyes, it seemed to him that they were losing their light and terror, that they were growing tame and dull; the charm was dissolving, the numbness was passing away, he could move once more.  He heard a light breathing close to his ear, and, half turning, saw the face of Elsie Venner, looking motionless into the reptile’s eyes, which had shrunk and faded under the stronger enchantment of her own.