’What!’ smiled Ludovico; ’no excuse, no explanation? No answer of any kind? Shall I call, then?’ He seemed to hesitate. ’Yet perhaps one loop-hole, though undeserved, I’ll lease thee on condition.’ He moved again forward a little, and spoke in a lower tone: ’There’s news wanted of a certain stolen ring. Dog! do I not know who thieved it, and for whom? Now shalt thou undertake to go yet once again, and, robbing the receiver, bring the spoil to me—or be damned here and now for thy villainy.’ He thought he had netted at last the quarry of his long, patient stalking; but for once his confidence was at fault. Watching intently for the effect of his words, he grew conscious of some change transfiguring, out of terror and astonishment, the face of his victim. Foul, ignoble, animal beyond redemption as that was in all its features, its swinish eyes could yet extract and emit, it seemed, from the thin, dead ashes of some ancient fire, a stubborn spark of self-renunciation. He could read it in them unmistakably. The man stood straight before him, for the first and only time in his life, a hero. Ludovico gazed in silence. He found, to do him the right justice, this psychic revelation of acuter interest to him than his own defeat foreseen in the light of it. But Tassino’s subdued whimpering jarred him out of his abstraction. ’Well, is it agreed?’ he asked with a sigh. For the moment he almost shrunk in the apprehension of an affirmative reply. The rogue drew himself suddenly together. ’Call, Messer,’ he said. ’That is my answer.’ His chin dropped on his breast. Tassino uttered a cry, and hid his face in his hands. Not a word or apparent movement followed; but when, goaded by the fearful stillness, the two dared to look up once more, they found themselves alone. Then, at that, Tassino shrieked and sprang to the grille. ’My God!’ he sobbed; ’he has gone, and left me to my fate!’ He moved to escape by the door, but Narcisso caught and wrenched him back. ’What ails the fool!’ he protested in his teeth. ’My orders be to keep, not kill thee, man!’ Messer Ludovico, walking enveloped within a little cloud of his adherents, smiled to himself on his way back to the palace. ’The fascination of the serpent,’ mused he, shaking his head—’the fascination of the serpent! How could that crude organism be expected to resist the arts of our Lamia, when I myself could fall near swooning to them? Hath he betrayed me to others? I think not; yet it were well to have him silenced betimes. The weakness was to threaten where I dared not yet perform. Yet it may chance, after all, he shall come to be prevailed on for the ring.’ ’The ring!’ he muttered, as he climbed presently to his chamber—’the ring! I think it comes to zone the world in my imagination!’