d hung there in my childish years.
I touched the cross with my right hand in sign of oath and
steadfastness. "I am ready," I said to her. "What do you wish?"

She answered, "You must free me. You are strong."

Even then I did not understand. "Free?" I repeated. "You would fly with
me?"

She gave a gesture, superb, impatient, contemptuous. She drew herself
backward and more erect. Her eyes had a terrible brilliancy in them. She
was so beautiful, but as fierce in that hour as the wild beast that I
saw once at a fair break from its cage and descend amidst the people,
and which I strangled in my arms unaided.

She murmured through her closed teeth, "You must kill him. You are
strong."

With a bound I rose to my feet. In the burning night an icy cold chilled
my blood, my limbs, my heart.

Kill him? Whom? The old man? I, young and strong as I was, and his
wife's lover?

I looked at her. What will be the scaffold to-morrow to me, since I have
lived through that moment?

She looked at me, always with her sorceress's eyes. "You must kill him,"
she said briefly. "It will be so easy to you. If you love me it will be
done. If not--farewell."

A horrible terror seized on me. I said nothing. I was stupefied. The
gloomy shadows of the chamber surrounded us like a mystic vapor; the
pale figures of the tapestries seemed like the ghosts arisen from the
grave to witness against us; the oppressive heat of the night hour lay
on our heads like an iron hand.

A phantom parted us: the spectre of a cowardly crime had come between
us.

"You do not love me," she said slowly. She grew impatient, angered,
feverish: a dumb rage began to work in her. She had no fear.

I drew my breath with effort. It seemed as if some one were strangling
me. Kill him! Kill him! These ghastly words re-echoed in my ears. Kill
an old and feeble man? It was worse than a crime: it was a cowardice.

"You do not love me," she repeated with utter scorn. "Go--go!"

A cry to her sprang from my very soul: "Anything else, anything but
that! Ask my own life, and you shall have it."

"I ask what I wish."

As she answered me thus she drew herself in all her full height upward
under the faint radiance from the lamp. Her magnificent beauty shone in
it like a grand white flower of the datura under the suns of autumn. A
disdain without bounds, without limit, without mercy, gleamed from her
eyes. She despised me--a man of the people, a public wrestler, a bravo,
onl