'You are going into danger,' she said. 'You may not come back. You told me so.' He tried to laugh, and answered in a careless tone:-- 'I have come back from far more dangerous expeditions. Besides, I have guests to-morrow--that is a good reason for not being killed!' He stood beside her, one hand half-thrust into his loose belt. She took the other, which hung down, and looked up to him, still pleading. 'Please, please do not go to-night!' Still he shook his head; nothing could move him, and he would go. A piteous look came into her eyes while they appealed to his in vain, and suddenly she dropped his hand and buried her face in the soft leathern pillow. 'You had made me forget that I am only a slave!' she cried. The cushion muffled her voice, and the sentence was broken by a sob, though no tears came with it. 'I would go to-night, though my own mother begged me to stay,' Zeno answered. Zoë turned her head without lifting it, and looked up at him sideways. 'Then much depends on your going,' she said, with a question in her tone. 'If it were only for yourself, for your pleasure, or your fortune, you would not refuse your own mother!' Zeno turned and began to walk up and down the room, but he said nothing in reply. A thought began to dawn in her mind. 'But if it were for your country--for Venice----' He glanced sharply at her as he turned back towards her in his walk, and he slackened his pace. Zoë waited a moment before she spoke again, looked down, thoughtfully pinched the folds of silk on her knee, and looked up suddenly again as if an idea had struck her. 'And though I am only your bought slave,' she said, 'I would not hinder you then. I mean, I would not even try to keep you from running into danger--for Venice!' She held her head up proudly now, and the last words rang out in a tone that went to the man's heart. He was not far from her when she spoke them. The last syllable had not died away on the quiet air and he already held her up in his arms, lifted clear from the floor, and his kisses were raining on her lips, and on her eyes, and her hair. She laughed low at the storm she had raised. 'I love you!' he whispered again and again softly, roughly, and triumphantly by turns. She loved him too, and quite as passionately just then; every kiss woke a deep and delicious thrill that made her whole body quiver with delight, and each oft-repeated syllable of the three whispered words rang like a silver trumpet-note in her heart. But for all that her thoughts raced on, already following him in the coming hours.