tremor shook him from head to foot. The fair woman's face that was
lifted so close to his own seemed spectral and far off; and for a
fleeting moment her very beauty grew into something like
hideousness, as if the strange effect of the picture he had
painted of her was now becoming actual and apparent--namely, the
face of death looking through the mask of life. Yet he did not
loosen his arms from about her waist; on the contrary he clasped
her even more closely, and kept his eyes fixed upon her with such
pertinacity that it seemed as if he expected her to vanish from
his sight while he still held her.

"To play the part of an Araxes aright," she murmured then in slow
and dulcet accents, "you would need to be cruel and remorseless,
and sacrifice my life--or any woman's life--to your own clamorous
and selfish passion. But you,--Armand Gervase,--educated,
civilized, intellectual, and totally unlike the barbaric Araxes,
could not do that, could you? The progress of the world, the
increasing intelligence of humanity, the coming of the Christ,
these things are surely of some weight with you, are they not? Or
are you made of the same savage and impenitent stuff as composed
the once famous yet brutal warrior of old time? Do you admire the
character and spirit of Araxes?--he who, if history reports him
truly, would snatch a woman's life as though it were a wayside
flower, crush out all its sweetness and delicacy, and then fling
it into the dust withered and dead? Do you think that because a
man is strong and famous, he has a right to the love of woman?--a
charter to destroy her as he pleases? If you remember the story I
told you, Araxes murdered with his own hand Ziska-Charmazel the
woman who loved him."