"Listen, Mario," exclaimed Pilar half aloud, in a choking voice. "This is not the way to treat me. Really, it is not, if you love anyone on earth! for I love you and I have always loved you. Yes, in the days when we were equally poor, sleeping on the same heather and begging on the same road, I was in love with you. I was born so; I cannot remember a single day in my whole life when I was not consumed by the passion of love or hatred. I never had any childhood! I was born of flame and I shall die of flame, a genuine spark from the stake! What does it matter? Even so, I am worth more to you than your Lauriane, who has always despised you and who will never love anything but her old heretics--luckily for her! Yes, luckily for her, I tell you! for I know all about both of your lives. I have been twice in your province, and one day I passed close to you without your recognizing me. You tossed me a small coin. See, here it is at my neck, concealed under my necklaces as my most precious treasure; I made a hole in it, and I wrote your name on it with the point of a knife. It is my talisman. When I no longer have it, I shall die!" "Come, come," said Mario, "enough of this nonsense! What do you want now? Why did you return here at the peril of your life, and why did you wait for me at this door? Give me back that coin, and take these gold pieces which you may need." "Keep your gold, Mario; I do not need it; I wish to keep and I shall keep your pledge, although you blush to know that your name is written on my breast. I have come here to tell you my story, and you must listen to it." "Tell it quickly then; it is very cold and I am sleepy." "I wish to tell it to you alone, and your page is listening. Come outside the walls with me." "No, my page is sleeping against the door. Speak here, and make haste, or I leave you." "Listen then, I shall soon have told it all. You know that my father was hanged and my mother burned!" "Yes, I remember that you often told me so. Well?" "Well, La Flèche brought me up to torment me. It was he who broke my bones to make me more flexible, and carried me about in a cage to make me ill and frantic. He exhibited me like a wild beast that bites everybody." "But you took a horrible revenge upon him, did you not?" "Yes, I suffocated him with sand and stones and dirt, when he was calling: 'Help! I am thirsty! I am thirsty!'--One of his arms still moved, and he tried to choke me with it. But, at the risk of my life, I forced what life he had left down his throat. Didn't I owe him that? Wasn't it my right? You would have saved him perhaps, and he would have paid you like Bellinde, who, but for me, would have succeeded in poisoning you all yesterday, you and your father and your servants, in order, so she said, to fulfil the prediction I had made before witnesses, and to protect my fame as a soothsayer." "And then you----"