“Why did he forsake you?” asked the Countess shyly. In her own mind she seemed but a simple child in the presence of this wild and passionate personality. Yes, he had forsaken her, left her for ever, she reflected, and she shuddered at the thought. And now he was dead. At the moment she felt doubtful of the enterprise she had undertaken. “He is dead,” she said in a low voice which vibrated. “Who?” cried Cara. “Your friend ... Hull!” answered the Countess, preparing to enter sympathetically into the girl’s feelings, the image of Wenk growing yet fainter in her subconscious mind. But the other exclaimed passionately, “What are you saying? The man I mean is not dead; he is alive, and yet I sit here in prison. Yonder in the town outside he stands, strong as a tower, firm as a rock, I tell you! How can a puny thing like you know what he was? All others were as dirt beneath his feet, and their faithlessness too small a trifle to consider! Hull is dead, but what does _that_ matter? Who cares an atom about _him_? But that other, the master, the lord, he lives there in the free air, where there is light and love and life ... where he might bear to have me lying at his feet, like a rug that only serves to warm his toes. He is the great man, the lord, the master! He is a bear, a lion, a royal Bengal tiger, do you hear? He does not belong to this cold and frosty land; he comes from Bengal, from paradise, from a place I shall never see again! And I--I--am left to linger in this dungeon!” Suddenly she said, quite calmly and seriously, “Tell me, do you think there are men whose will is so strong that they can break down even these walls when they know how passionately I desire it?” “There are no such men outside, but within us there are!” answered the Countess, carried away by the vehemence of that passionate storm of feeling which had so lately broken over her. How contemptible it was of her, she thought, to have desired to outwit a human being. She felt mean in her own estimation, and casting all projects and promises to the winds, she began to glow in the presence of this strange personality like the spark of an electric current. “Yes, they are to be found in us!” she repeated. “He! he! the conqueror!” sang Cara, with a sound of passion in her tone, and in the Countess’s heart, too, there sprang up, like a marble image, the form of the man she had met a few evenings before. On her heart this image was sculptured, and she allowed its impress to recur again and again and remain there. “Do you love him?” she asked the dancer. But the other answered, as if brushing away an unconsidered trifle, “I ... love? I _adore_ him!”