nd pricking the brawn on my forearm
till a head of blood appeared, set her red lips to it, and took it into
herself.

"Ah," she said, with her eyes sparkling, "now you are part of me indeed,
Deucalion, and I feel you have strengthened me already." She pulled down
the neck of her robe. "Let me make you my return."

I pricked the rounded whiteness of her shoulder. Gods! when I remembered
who was beneath us as we sat on that throne, I could have driven the
blade through to her heart! And then I, too, put down my lips, and took
the drop of her blood that was yielded to me.

My tongue was dry, my throat was parched, and my face suffused, and I
thought I should have choked.

But the Empress, who was ordinarily so acute, was misled then. "It
thrills you?" she cried. "It burns within you like living fire? I have
just felt it. By my face! Deucalion, if I had known the pleasure it
gives to be made a wife, I do not think I should have waited this long
for you. Ah, yes; but with another man I should have had no thrill. I
might have gone through the ceremony with another, but it would have
left me cold. Well, they say this feeling comes to a woman but once in
her time, and I would not change it for the glory of all my conquests
and the whirl of all my power." She leaned in close to me so that the
red curls of her hair swept my cheek, and her breath came hot against my
mouth. "Tasted you ever any sweet so delicious as this knowledge that we
are made one now, Deucalion, past all possible dissolving?"

I could not lie to her any more just then. The Gods know how honestly I
had striven to play the part commanded me for Atlantis' good, but there
is a limit to human endurance, and mine was reached. I was not all anger
towards her. I had some pity for this passion of hers, which had grown
of itself certainly, but which I had done nothing to check; and the
indecent frankness with which it was displayed was only part of the
livery of potentates who flaunt what meaner folk would coyly hide. But
always before my eyes was a picture of the girl on whom her jealousy had
taken such a bitter vengeance, and to invent spurious lover's talk then
was a thing my tongue refused to do.

"Words are poor things," I said, "and I am a man unused to women, and
have but a small stock of any phrases except the dryest. Remember,
Phorenice, a week agone, I did not know what love was, and now that I
have learned the lesson, somewhat of the suddenest, the lang