en away and buried--

"Come in and help to carry"--

and with ghastly glee she adds--

". . . We may sleep
Anywhere in the whole wide house to-night."

* * * * *

Now the dialogue sways between her deliberate sensuous allurement of the
man and his deepening horror at what they have done. She winds and
unwinds her hair--was it so that he once liked it? But he cannot look;
he would give her neck and her splendid shoulders, "both those breasts
of yours," if this thing could be undone. It is not the mere
killing--though he would "kill the world so Luca lives again," even to
fondle her as before--but the thought that he has eaten the dead man's
bread, worn his clothes, "felt his money swell my purse." . . . _This_
is the intolerable; "there's a recompense in guilt"--

"One must be venturous and fortunate:--
What is one young for else?"

and thus their passion is justified; but to have killed the man who
rescued him from starvation by letting him teach music to his wife . . .
why--

". . . He gave me
Life, nothing less"--

and if he did reproach the perfidy, "and threaten and do more," had he
no right after all--what was there to wonder at?

"He sat by us at table quietly:
_Why must you lean across till our cheeks touched?_"

In that base blaming of her alone we get the measure of Sebald as at
this hour he is. He turns upon her with a demand to know how she now
"feels for him." Her answer, wherein the whole of her nature (as, again,
at this hour it is) reveals itself--callous but courageous, proud and
passionate, cruel in its utter sensuality, yet with the force and
honesty which attend on all simplicity, good or evil--her answer strikes
a truer note than does anything which Sebald yet has said, or is to say.
She replies that she loves him better now than ever--

"And best (_look at me while I speak to you_)
Best for the crime."

She is glad that the "affectation of simplicity" has fallen off--

". . . this naked crime of ours
May not now be looked over: look it down."

And were not the joys worth it, great as it is? Would he give up the
past?

"Give up that noon I owned my love for you?"

--and as, in her impassioned revocation of the sultry summer's day, she
brings back to him the very sense of the sun-drenched garden, the man at
last is conque