Slowly he moved toward the enchantress, who from her half-reclining position fixed her eyes in a long and questioning gaze upon the new-comer, a gaze which thrilled him through and through. He dared not look into those eyes, which he felt burning into his. His head was beginning to spin and his heart to beat with a strange sensation of wonderment and fear. Never till this hour had he seen Ginevra's equal in beauty, and now that it broke on his vision, it was with the face, the form, the hair, the eyes, the hands, of the woman so passionately loved. Only the face was more pale—even with the pallor of death, and there was something in the depths of those eyes which he had never seen in Ginevra's. But the light, the perfume, the place and the seductive beauty of the woman before him, garbed as she was in a filmy, transparent robe of silvery tissue, which clung like a pale mist about the voluptuous curves of her body, flowing round her like the glistening waves of a cascade, began to play havoc with his senses.
"Welcome, stranger, in the Groves of Enchantment," she spoke, waving her beautiful snowy arms toward her visitor. "I rejoice to see that your courage deserves the welcome."
There was an undercurrent of laughter in her musical tones, as she pointed to a seat by her side. Unable to answer, unable to resist, Eckhardt moved a few paces nearer. His brain whirled. For a moment Ginevra's image seemed forgotten in the contemplation of the rival of her dead beauty. A wild, desperate longing seized him. On a sudden impulse he turned away, in a dizzy effort to escape from the mesmeric gleam of those sombre, haunting eyes, which pierced the very depths of his soul. Fascinated, at the same time repelled, his very soul yearned for her whose embrace he knew was destruction and he was filled with a strange sudden fear. There was something terrible in the steadfast contemplation which the woman bestowed upon him,—something that seemed to lie outside the pale of human passions, and the pallor of her exquisite face seemed to increase in proportion as the devouring fire of her eyes burnt more intensely.
"Are you afraid of me?" she laughed, raising her arms and holding them out toward him.
Still he hesitated. His breast heaved madly as his eyes met those, which swam in a soft languor, strangely intoxicating. Her lips parted in a faint sigh.
"Eckhardt," she said tremulously, "Eckhardt."
Then she paused as if to watch the effect of her words upon him.
Mute, oppressed by indistinct hovering memories, Eckhardt fed his gaze on her seductive fairness, but a terrible pain and anguish gnawed at his heart. Not only the face, even the voice was that of Ginevra.
"Everything in death has its counterpart in life:"—
That had been the pass-word to her presence.