I said,--a white silk square on which she had wrought a hand with a
gleaming sickle, reversed by tall wheat whose barbed grains bent full
and ripe to the reaper, and round the margin, half-pictured, wound the
wild hedge-roses of Paestum. She threw it down and came toward me in
haste, and drew me through an inner apartment.

"He has returned, they say," she said presently,--mentioning the
Neapolitan,--"and it would be unfortunate, if you met."

"Unfortunate for _him_, if we met here!"

"How fearless! Yet he is subtler than the snake in Eden. I fear him as I
detest him."

"Why fear him?"

"That I cannot tell. Some secret sign, some unspeakable intuition,
assures me of injury through him."

"Dearest, put it by. The strength of all these surrounding leagues with
their swarm does not flow through his wrist, as it does through mine. He
is more powerless than the mote in the air."

"You are so confident!" she said.

"How can I be anything else than confident? The very signs in the sky
speak for us, and half the priests are ours, and the land itself is an
oath. Look out, Lenore! Look down on these purple fields that so sweetly
are taking nightfall; look on these rills that braid the landscape and
sing toward the sea; see yonder the row of columns that have watched