Her eyes, luminously bright, glowed upon him. He felt the thrill of them. He realized that there was something more than mere magnetism in that gaze, too. There was a quality about it that was hypnotic. He knew that at that moment she was exerting all the latent powers within her to bring him under the spell of her charms.
Nick Carter had anticipated something of this sort, and he was prepared for it.
He had suggested to the chief that there were occasions when it was well to play one’s cards face up on the table, and up to this point he had done that very thing. He had purposely thrust himself in this woman’s way in order that she might have all the opportunity she desired to exert her powers of fascination—for Nick Carter intended all along to appear to yield to them.
That was the game he had intended, from the moment her presence in Paris was known to him, to play. He meant to let her suppose that he was the same sort of weakling as the others had been, who were inimical to her interests.
In a word, he meant to appear to become her willing victim.
He realized that he had an extremely difficult part to play. He knew what her intelligence was and that she would be as shrewd as he in every move that she might make—unless her supreme confidence in her own powers, so many times successful with others, should lead her astray.
But egotism, too much self-confidence, is the rock upon which many a one has foundered. Nick Carter believed it to be the one which would be the undoing of this brilliant woman, who had so successfully defied the police departments of all of Europe, and, figuratively, snapped her fingers at them.
As she approached him across the floor he arose and faced her.
When she smiled into his eyes he compelled his own to glow with an answering fire.