form a dual flame in Hell which must burn on and on to all
eternity! Leap to my arms, master and lord,--king and conqueror!
Here, here!" and she smote her white arms against her whiter
bosom. "Take all your fill of burning wickedness--of cursed joy!
and then--sleep! as you have slept before, these many thousand
years!"

Still mute and aghast he stared at her; his senses swam, his brain
reeled, and then slowly, like the lifting of a curtain on the last
scene of a dire tragedy, a lightning thought, a scorching memory,
sprang into his mind and overwhelmed him like a rolling wave that
brings death in its track. With a fierce oath he rushed towards
her, and seized her hands in his--hands cold as ice and clammy as
with the dews of the grave.

"Ziska! Woman! Devil! Speak before you drive me to madness! What
passion moves you thus--what mystic fooling? Into what place have
I been decoyed at your bidding? Why am I brought hither? Speak,
speak!--or I shall murder you!"

"Nay!" she said, and her slight swaying form dilated and grew till
she seemed to rise up from the very ground and to tower above him
like an enraged demon evoked from mist or flame. "You have done
that once! To murder me twice is beyond your power!" And as she
spoke her hands slipped from his like the hands of a corpse newly
dead. "Never again can you hurl forth my anguished soul unprepared
to the outer darkness of things invisible; never again! For I am
free!--free with an immortal freedom--free to work out repentance
or revenge,--even as Man is free to shape his course for good or
evil. He chooses evil; I choose revenge! What place is this, you