"When the snake was safe, he drew out, still smiling and listening, a little pipe that looked as if it were made of straw, very common and dirty. He held it up to his black lips, and began to play very softly and sleepily. Desmond, the tune he played was charmed. It was a tune composed--for--for--" She broke off. "You know the Pied Piper had his tune," she said; "the rats had to follow it. Well, this tune was for the serpents." "To charm them you mean?" "Wisely--dangerously--almost irresistibly, perhaps in time, Desmond, quite, quite irresistibly. There is a music for all creatures, all reptiles, birds,--everything that lives; this was for the snakes." "Well, but, Claire, how did you know that?" She looked at him with a sort of dull amusement and pity in her half-shut eyes. "Shall I tell you?" "Yes." "I knew it, because the tune charmed me, Desmond." "Ah, you are acting! I half suspected it from the first," Renfrew exclaimed almost roughly. He sat up as a man who has been lying under a spell stirs when the spell is broken. Now he knew that his pipe was out, and he felt for his match-box. But Claire still kept her eyes fixed on him, and laid her hand on his arm gently. "No, I am not acting," she said. "The tune charmed me. You see I am a woman; and there are many women who feel at moments that what attracts some special creature, thing, of the so-called world without a soul, attracts them too. Some men can whistle a woman as they would a dog, can't they?" "Perhaps." "Yes, and some men can charm a woman as they could charm a serpent." "I don't understand you, Claire." "You don't choose to. The animal is in us all, hidden deftly by Nature, the artful dodger of the scheme of creation, Desmond; and we know it when the right tune is played to summon it from its slumber in the nest of the human body. Only the right tune can waken it." "The animal! But--" "Or the reptile, perhaps. What does it matter? This was the right tune for me. I lay there like a snake in the grass and it thrilled me! And all the time the black man smiled and listened for the rustling at his feet. You look black, Desmond! How absurd of you to be angry!" And she closed her fingers over his hand till the frown died out of his face. "The tune seemed to draw me to the man. I understood just how he had captured the serpent that lay hidden in his bosom. It had once lain in ambush as I lay now, long ago perhaps, in the desert among the rocks, on the sand, Desmond." "Ah, the sand!" he said, remembering suddenly the strange feeling Claire had described as coming upon her when she was trying to sleep. "Yes. And he had drawn it from the sand to the oasis among the palms where he stood playing, till he heard its rustling in the grass about his feet, as it glided nearer to him, and nearer, and nearer, till at last it reared up its body, and wound up him and round him, and laid its flat head between his great hands. Yes, that was how it came." "You fancy."