feel them, here,--" she clasped
her hands above her heart,--"and sometimes they make me glad, and
sometimes sorry, and sometimes they frighten me, and I do not at all
know why. But always I long to hear more. They make me to want things I
have not got, to know things I do not know, for I am very foolish. Oh,
thou wizard of the silver tongue!" She raised both hands to his temples,
and he could feel that her fingers shook. "Play not with me for the sake
of thy sport, I pray thee! Ay, I am very foolish,--I know it,--for I may
not understand how such things be; but thy speech leads me as a nurse
leads her child by the hand, and I am afraid, because I cannot
understand whither thou wouldst have me go."

"Play with thee! Beloved, it is no play to me," Nicanor answered. "I'd
give thee all my life and soul, as I've given thee my heart, could I but
keep from thee a moment's fear or sorrow." He bent his head and kissed
her snowy eyelids. "Whatever God or gods there be that men may pray to,
may they have thee, lady mine, in their holy keeping. Whoever they may
be, I give thanks that this night they guarded thee--or was it the veil
of thine own white innocence around thee?--for this night hath a beast
been held at bay."

He let her go, and stood watching hungrily as she slipped away from him
across the grass. Over the surrounding walls of the villa a faint gray
mist came stealing. The song of the insects had died, and the world hung
silent, awaiting the mystery of the day. The trees and bushes of the
garden massed themselves into denser shadow against the tinge of ghostly
light. From somewhere, far away, a cock crew, and another answered.

Nicanor listened until the faint click of a closing window reached him.
Suddenly he buried his face in his hands and stood an instant
motionless, a dark and sombre figure in the gray loneliness of dawn.
Before the light had gathered strength for him to be more than a moving
blot among the shadows, he pulled himself together with a quick shake of
his shoulders, and vanished amid the tangle of vines and shrubbery that
hid the little garden door.

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PAWNS AND PLAYERS

BOOK III

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Book III

PAWNS AND PLAYERS

I

The lord Eudemius, covered with tawny leopard skins, lay stretched on a
couch of carven ebony in the library of the villa, of whi