Here, then, was the secret of what this woman had been able to accomplish in her defiance of authority and in her undoing of the men who had stood in her way in the past.
Her weapon had been hypnotism, and with it she had lured that Russian prince, that Duc de Luvois, that Austrian, and others to their death.
Slowly that free hand of hers stroked the backs of his.
Brightly, almost with a suggestion of living fire, her big eyes burned into his.
He felt a tightening at his throat. There was a sensation as if a rubber band wound tightly around his brows; but he controlled himself. He managed to fix his mind upon the object of his presence there, and he felt that he could resist her, even unto the end.
Her victims had not suspected this quality in her. They had been men who had thought that she was succumbing to them rather than they to her.
He forced his eyes to express all that she wished to show, or to give out that lack of expression which would assure her that she was succeeding.
All the while that they stood there, facing each other, with their hands clasped, she kept on murmuring to him in a low voice, but uttering words that would have been meaningless under any other circumstances.
It was the droning of her voice, the soft cadences of it, that tided in what she had undertaken to do. She was so accustomed to success, so entirely unfamiliar with failure, that she could not see that her effort was failing, and that Nick Carter was just as much the master of himself now as when he entered the parlor with her.