The girl shrank back in terror for an instant, and then, to his surprise, her hand was still and cold and steady. Not a tremor in the tense body. Her brown eyes, staring wide, held his gaze without a sign of weakness or of fear. Something in her attitude startled the beast within him. He suddenly dropped her hand and changed his tone. "Come, let's not quarrel! Don't be foolish. It is for you I've been scheming and planning the past year. For you the regent's palace was planned. Within five years a hundred thousand people will be here. The State will be rich beyond our wildest dreams, and I shall be the State. I want you to sit by my side." [Illustration: "WOLF GRASPED HER."] "You say this to me after all that Catherine has been to you and your life?" "And why not? If I no longer love, should I be chained?" "And this is the ideal you came here to build?" she asked, with scorn. "Certainly. It is the essence of Socialism. In my next proclamation I shall declare for the freedom of love. Every great Socialist has preached this. Marriage and the family form the tap-root out of which the whole system of capitalism grew. The system can never be destroyed until the family is annihilated. I had thought you a woman whose brilliant intellect had faced this issue and broken the chains of a degrading bourgeois morality." "The chains of love, I find, are very sweet," she interrupted, with dreamy tenderness. "You talk this twaddle about romantic love? You, the leader of a revolution! Come, you are no longer a child. We are living now in the world of freedom and reality where men and women say the unspoken things and live to the utmost reach of their being, body and soul." "Is it a world worth living in?" she asked. "Was the old world of family life, of starvation and misery, worth living in?" Wolf retorted. "Perhaps I might have said no an hour ago, but now that my lips have met my lover's the dream of the old family life, with its sanctity and purity, begins to call me. And something deep down within answers with a cry of joy. Why should you desire me, knowing that I thus love another?" "You can love where you like," he snapped, as his big jaws came together. "I can get along without your love. I just want you--and I'm going to have you!" "I'll die first!" "We shall see. Time works wonders." With a shudder Barbara turned and left him. CHAPTER XXXIII EQUALITY Barbara asked Wolf for permission to visit Norman in prison. The Regent shook his head. "No, my little beauty, it's not wise. I promise you that not a hair of his head shall be harmed. He is safe and well. If you wish to test my power, try to bribe my guards and see him." Day after day Barbara sought in vain to gain admittance to the jail, send or receive a message from within. Her lover had disappeared as completely as if the earth had opened and swallowed his body.