Zeno sat still and looked at her. It seemed to him that she was far more beautiful than he had at first realised. As she leaned sideways against the big cushions, turning her face away and her shoulder towards him, there was something in the line of her cheek and of her neck where it joined the ear, and in the little downy ringlets at the roots of her hair that stirred his blood, against his will. Also, the devil came and whispered to his heart that she was his personal property, as much as his horse, his house and his stores of merchandise. The laws about slaves were uncertain enough in Italy, but there was no doubt of the law in Constantinople. The slave Arethusa, weighing so many talents and minæ, having so many sound teeth, and other good points, was the absolute property of Carlo Zeno. He might kill her, if he liked, in any way he chose, and the law would not call it murder. There would be one slave less, and he would have thrown away four hundred gold ducats; but that would be all. She seemed to him the most beautiful creature in the world, and the devil was not suggesting that he should kill her; not by any means. For a long time, the man and his slave were silent, and scarcely moved, and neither of them afterwards forgot those minutes. In their thoughts each was struggling with what seemed an impossibility, a something which could never be done. The high-born girl, for the sake of a mother who was not her mother, and of brothers who were not of her blood, was resolved to be to the end what she had made herself to save their lives, the obedient slave of a merchant who had paid gold for her. It was worse than death, but if she did not die of it, she must live through it, lest the good she had done should be undone again. The man who had the law's own right of life and death over her, and whose warm young blood her beauty stirred so profoundly, chose to resist and play that he was not the master after all. His lean face was calm enough in the quiet lamplight, as it would have been in raging battle; but within was that he would not care to feel again, nor perhaps to let others know that he had felt. At last, wondering at the stillness, half-believing and quite hoping that he was no longer in the room, Zoë turned her head. His eyes were on her, but there was something in them that she could not fear. 'Tell me who you are,' he said quietly. Of all questions she had least expected this one, which seemed so natural to him. She waited a moment before she spoke. 'Are you dissatisfied, sir?' she asked in a low voice. 'Has the Bokharian cheated you?' 'No! What a thought!' 'Then you know what I am, and I can tell you nothing more, my lord. Can a slave have a pedigree?' 'I do not believe that you were born a slave,' said Zeno, leaning forward a little and looking into her eyes. After a moment, her lids drooped under his gaze, but she would not speak. 'Have you nothing to say?' he asked, disappointed at her silence.