I have done my best to write her down in my mind a commonplace, vulgar, good-natured mountebank.  But I can do so no longer.

There is something deep down in the soul of Lola Brandt which sets her apart from the kindly race of womankind; whether it is the devil or a touch of pre-Adamite splendour or an ancestral catamount, I make no attempt to determine.  At any rate, she is too grand a creature to fritter her life away on a statistic-hunting and pheasant-shooting young Briton like Dale Kynnersley.  He would never begin to understand her.  I will save her from Dale for her own sake.

All this, ladies and gentlemen, because her eyes fascinated me, and caused me to hold my breath, and made my heart beat.

And will Captain Vauvenarde understand her?  Of course he won’t.  But then he is her husband, and husbands are notoriously and cum privilegio dunder-headed.  I make no pretensions to understand her, but as I am neither her lover nor her husband it does not matter.  She says nothing diabolical or eerie or fantastic or feline or pre-Adamite or uncanny or spiritual; and yet she is, in a queer, indescribable way, all these things.

“Je le veux,” she said, and we drank in each other’s souls, or gaped at each other like a pair of idiots just as you please.  I had a horrible, yet pleasurable consciousness that she had gripped hold of my nerves of volition.  She was willing me to live.  I was a puppet in her hands like the wild tom-cat.  At that moment I declare I could have purred and rubbed my head against her knee.  I would have done anything she bade me.  If she had sent me to fetch the Cham of Tartary’s cap or a hair of the Prester John’s beard, I would have telephoned forthwith to Rogers to pack a suit-case and book a seat in the Orient express.

What would have happened next Heaven alone knows—­for we could not have gone on gazing at each other until I backed myself out at the door by way of leave-taking—­had not Anticlimax arrived in the person of Mr. Anastasius Papadopoulos in his eternal frock-coat.  But his gloves were black.

As usual he fell on his knees and kissed his lady’s hand.  Then he rose and greeted me with solemn affability.

“C’est un privilege de rencontrer den gnadigsten Herrn,” said he.

Confining myself to one language, I responded by informing him that it was an honour always to meet so renowned a professor, and inquired politely after the health of Hephaestus.

“Ah, Signore!” he cried.  “Do not ask me.  It is a tragedy from which I shall never recover.”

He sat down on a footstool by the side of Madame Brandt and burst into tears, which coursed down his cheeks and moustache and hung like drops of dew from the point of his imperial.

“Is he dead?” asked Madame.

“I wish he were!  No.  It is only the iron self-restraint that I possess which prevented me from slaying him on the spot.  But poor Santa Bianca!  My gentle and accomplished Angora.  He has killed her.  I can scarcely raise my head through grief.”