then."

"I do not believe that any woman is as beautiful as I am," answered the
Georgian, with the quiet simplicity of a savage.

"But if there were one, and you saw her?" insisted the man, to see what
she would say.

"We could not both live. One of us would kill the other."

"I believe you would," said Jacopo, watching her face.

She had forgotten his presence while she spoke; a fierce hardness had
come into her eyes, and her upper lip was a little raised, in a cruel
expression, just showing her teeth. He was surprised.

"I never saw you like that," he said.

"You should not make me think of killing," she answered, suddenly
leaving her seat and kneeling beside him on the divan. "It is not good
to think too much of killing--it makes one wish to do it."

"Then try and kill me with kisses," he said, looking into her eyes, that
were growing tender again.

"You would not know you were dying," she whispered, her lips quite close
to his.

As she kissed him, she loosened the collar from his white throat, and
smoothed his thick hair back from his forehead upon the pillow, and she
saw how pale he was, under her touch.

But by and by he fell asleep, and then she very softly drew her arm from
beneath his tired head, and slipped from his side, and stood up, with a
little sigh of relief. The candle had burned to the socket; she blew it
out.

It was still an hour before dawn when she left the room, lifting the
heavy curtain that hung before the door of her inner chamber. There, a
faint light was burning before a shrine in a silver cup filled with oil.
As she fastened the door noiselessly behind her, a man caught her in his
arms, lifting her off her feet like a child.

Shaggy black hair grew low upon his bossy forehead, his dark eyes were
fierce and bloodshot, a rough beard only half concealed the huge jaw and
iron lips. He was half clad, in shirt and hose, and the muscles of his
neck and arms stood out like brown ropes as he pressed the beautiful
creature to his broad chest.

"I thought he would never sleep to-night," she whispered.

Her eyelids drooped, and her cheeks grew deadly white, and the strong
man felt the furious beating of her heart against his own breast. He was
Aristarchi, the Greek captain who had sold her for a slave, and she
loved him.

In the wild days of sea-fighting among the Greek islands he had taken a
small trading galley that had been driven out of her course. He left not
a man of her crew