an. You can never comprehend how utterly I
loved him."

"You are stubborn. I shall have trouble with you. But this notion of
yours is plainly a mistaken notion. That you love me is indisputable,
and this I propose to demonstrate. You will observe that I am quite
unarmed except for this dagger, which I now throw out of the
window--" with the word it jangled in the courtyard below. "I am in
Troyes alone among some thousand Frenchmen, any one of whom would
willingly give his life for the privilege of taking mine. You have but
to sound the gong beside you, and in a few moments I shall be a dead
man. Strike, then! For with me dies the English power in France.
Strike, Katharine! If you see in me but the King of England."

She was rigid; and his heart leapt when he saw it was because of
terror.

"You came alone! You dared!"

He answered, with a wonderful smile, "Proud spirit! How else might I
conquer you?"

"You have not conquered!" Katharine lifted the baton beside the gong,
poising it. God had granted her prayer--to save France. Now the past
and the ignominy of the past might be merged in Judith's nobler guilt.
But I must tell you that in the supreme hour, Destiny at her beck, her
main desire was to slap the man for his childishness. Oh, he had no
right thus to besot himself with adoration! This dejection at her feet
of his high destiny awed her, and pricked her, too, with her inability
to understand him. Angrily she flung away the baton. "Go! Ah, go!" she
cried, like one strangling. "There has been enough of bloodshed, and I
must spare you, loathing you as I do, for I cannot with my own hand
murder you."

But the King was a kindly tyrant, crushing independence from his
associates as lesser folk squeeze water from a sponge. "I cannot go
thus. Acknowledge me to be Alain, the man you love, or else strike
upon the gong."

"You are cruel!" she wailed, in her torture.

"Yes, I am cruel."

Katharine raised straining arms above her head in a hard gesture of
despair. "You have conquered. You know that I love you. Oh, if I could
find words to voice my shame, to shriek it in your face, I could
better endure it! For I love you. With all my body and heart and soul
I love you. Mine is the agony, for I love you! and presently I shall
stand quite still and see little Frenchmen scramble about you as
hounds leap about a stag, and afterward kill you. And after that I
shall live! I preserve France, but after I have slain you, Henr