e it is going to enter into the flesh.

Regina sat thinking and ready. She wished that she had Corbario himself
in her power, but it was something to have the woman who had helped
him. She was very glad that she had insisted on keeping Settimia in
spite of Marcello's remonstrances. It had made it possible to obtain the
information he wanted, and which, she felt sure, was to lead to
Corbario's destruction. She was to find out "at any cost"; those had
been Marcello's words, and she supposed he knew that she would obey him
to the letter. For she said to herself that he was the master, and that
if she did not obey him in such a matter, when he seemed so much in
earnest, he would be disappointed, and angry, and would then grow
quickly tired of her, and so the end would come. "At any cost," as he
had said it in his haste, meant to Regina at the cost of blood, and
life, and limb, if need were. Corbario was the enemy of the man she
loved; it was her lover's pleasure to find out his enemy and to be
revenged at last; what sort of woman must she be if she did not help
him? what was her love worth if she did not obey him? He had been always
kind to her, and more than kind; but it would have been quite the same
if he had treated her worse than a dog, provided he did not send her
away from him. She belonged to him, and he was the master, to do as he
pleased. If he sent her away, she would go; but if not, he might have
beaten her and she would never have complained. Now that he had given a
simple command, she was not going to disobey him. She had pride, but it
was not for him, and in her veins the blood of sixty generations of
slaves and serfs had come down to her through two thousand years, the
blood of men who had killed when they were bidden to kill by their
masters, whose masters had killed them like sheep in war and often in
peace, of women who had been reckoned as goods and as chattels with the
land on which their mothers had borne them--of men and women too often
familiar with murder and sudden death from their cradles to their
graves.

The minutes passed and Settimia's terror grew till the room swam with
her, and she lost hold upon herself, and did not know whether she
screamed or was silent, as her parched lips opened wide upon her parted
teeth. But she had made no sound, and Regina did not even look at her.
Death had not come yet; there was a respite of seconds, perhaps of
minutes.

At last Regina unclasped her hands and