resh and acid the water tastes; but your
hand shakes, and you are heated by your quick run for me--poor man."

With these words she looked at him with a peculiar expressive glance of
her large eyes, and gave him her right hand, which he pressed wildly to
his lips.

"That will do," she said smiling; "here comes the princess with a priest,
out of the hovel of the unclean. With what frightful words you terrified
me just now. It is true I gave you just cause to be angry with me; but
now you are kind again--do you hear?--and will bring your mother again to
see mine. Not a word. I shall see, whether cousin Paaker refuses me
obedience."

She threatened him playfully with her finger, and then growing grave she
added, with a look that pierced Paaker's heart with pain, and yet with
ecstasy, "Let us leave off quarrelling. It is so much better when people
are kind to each other."

After these words she walked towards the house of the paraschites, while
Paaker pressed his hands to his breast, and murmured:

"The drink is working, and she will be mine. I thank ye--ye Immortals!"

But this thanksgiving, which hitherto he had never failed to utter when
any good fortune had befallen him, to-day died on his lips. Close before
him he saw the goal of his desires; there, under his eyes, lay the magic
spring longed for for years. A few steps farther, and he might slake at
its copious stream his thirst both for love and for revenge.

While he followed the wife of Mena, and replaced the phial carefully in
his girdle, so as to lose no drop of the precious fluid which, according
to the prescription of the old woman, he needed to use again, warning
voices spoke in his breast, to which he usually listened as to a fatherly
admonition; but at this moment he mocked at them, and even gave outward
expression to the mood that ruled him--for he flung up his right hand
like a drunken man, who turns away from the preacher of morality on his
way to the wine-cask; and yet passion held him so closely ensnared, that
the thought that he should live through the swift moments which would
change him from an honest man into a criminal, hardly dawned, darkly on
his soul. He had hitherto dared to indulge his desire for love and
revenge in thought only, and had left it to the Gods to act for
themselves; now he had taken his cause out of the hand of the Celestials,
and gone into action without them, and in spite of them.

The sorceress Hekt passed him; she want