tinued Kafka, dreaming on. "She was born amid
the perfume of the roses, under the starlight, when the nightingale
was singing. And all things that lived, loved her, and submitted to her
voice and hand, and to her eyes and to her unspoken will, as running
water follows the course men give it, winding and gliding, falling
and rushing, full often of a roar of resistance that covers the deep,
quick-moving stream, flowing in spite of itself through the channel that
is dug for it to the determined end. And nothing resisted her. Neither
man nor woman nor child had any strength to oppose against her magic.
The wolf hounds licked her feet, the wolves themselves crouched fawning
in her path. For she is without fear--as she is without mercy. Is that
strange? What fear can there be for her who has the magic charm, who
holds sleep in the one hand and death in the other, and between whose
brows is set the knowledge of what shall be hereafter? Can any one harm
her? Has any one the strength to harm her? Is there anything on earth
which she covets and which shall not be hers?"

Though his voice was almost as soft as before, the evil smile flickered
again about his drawn lips as he looked into Unorna's face. He wondered
why she did not face him and crush him and force him to sleep with
her eyes as he knew she could do. But he himself was past fear. He had
suffered too much and cared not what chanced to him now. But she should
know that he knew all, if he told her so with his latest breath. Despair
had given him a strange control of his anger and of his words, and
jealousy had taught him the art of wounding swiftly, surely and with a
light touch. Sooner or later she would turn upon him and annihilate him
in a dream of unconsciousness; he knew that, and he knew that such faint
power of resisting her as he had ever possessed was gone. But so long as
she was willing to listen to him, so long would he torture her with
the sting of her own shame, and when her patience ended, or her caprice
changed, he would find some bitter word to cast at her in the moment
before losing his consciousness of thought and his power to speak.
This one chance of wounding was given to him and he would use it to the
utmost, with all subtlety, with all cruelty, with all determination to
torture.

"Whatsoever she covets is hers to take. No one escapes the spell in the
end, no one resists the charm. And yet it is written in the book of her
fate that she shall one day