as she crouched upon the bench.
Marcus snarled, like an aroused watch-dog, and said:

"Thou more than fool! Dost know what this night's work will bring thee?"

Nicanor, his heart pounding hard, his hands clenched, answered nothing,
glancing about him to see if the old man might be alone. But the garden
lay silent. Then he sprang, as a wolf springs, straight for the old
slave's throat, and felled him. Lady Varia screamed,--a quick, shrill
sound which stabbed the night stillness like a knife, and cried:

"Oh, kill him not--kill him not! I pray thee, kill him not!"

"Hush thee, dear lady, or the house will be upon us!" Nicanor exclaimed,
his words rushing through locked teeth. "Get quickly to thy chamber and
leave all things to me."

She sped away over the turf, panting with fear and excitement, and
flitted up the steps and across the marble walk and into her room, and
closed the window. Nicanor, kneeling on the slave's chest, gagging him
with a wad torn from his own garment, heard the doors shut with a gasp
of relief. He tied the old man's arms tightly with his girdle, trussing
him as he had trussed the carcasses of sheep to be loaded upon mules.
Then, having him bound and helpless, he rose and stood over him,
whetting his knife on his hand, with senses keyed to hear footsteps in
every stir of leaf and sigh of wind. But the garden lay always silent
under the moon's cold eye. He spoke to his captive, in a voice which
grated just above a whisper.

"I'll not kill thee now, since she begged thy life, old man. But while
thou'rt above the ground there's no more peace for me. Now what to do
with thee?"

He stood over his prisoner, motionless in meditation, muttering his
thoughts aloud.

"There's no place within the house to keep thee safe. And if that
clacking tongue of thine betrays us, it needs not much to fancy what
will happen then. This is what comes to pass when one serves a brutal
master, old man; one must e'en be a brute one's self. I cannot kill
thee; they'd miss thee and start a search--besides, my lady said me nay.
Ha, that makes thee squirm? Ay, she'd be mine for the lifting of my
finger--even I, Nicanor, thy master's slave, have but to say to her, thy
master's daughter, 'Go thither!' and she goes, and 'Come!' and she comes
to me as I will. Hearest thou that, old man? Her lips have been defiled
by a slave's kisses; she hath lain unresisting in a slave's arms, to the
unending shame of her proud lord father. A