My blood bounded in my veins. I asked nothing better of Fate. I glided along the old walls, leaving the central court and the master there absorbed in his work, and I found with some difficulty the little side-door by which I had entered the house before. I trembled from head to foot, as in that hour. I felt myself all at once to be ugly, heavy, stupid, a brute to frighten any woman--sweating from the labors of the day, covered with dust, poor and frightful in my rough hempen shirt, with my naked legs and my bare knees impregnated with the juice of the grapes. And I dared to love this woman--I! Loved her, though she had slain Phoebus. My mind was all in confusion: I was no longer master of myself. I scarcely drew breath; my head was giddy; I staggered as I went along those endless galleries and passages, as I had done that day when Phoebus had fallen on the sand of my arena. At last I reached--how I knew not--the room of the _arazzi_, scarcely lighted by a lamp of bronze that hung from the ceiling by a chain. In the twilight I saw the woman with the fatal gaze, with the lips of rose, with the features of Lucrezia, of Venus, the woman who in all ages has destroyed man. Then I forgot that I was a laborer, a peasant, a juggler, a wrestler, a vagabond--that I was clad in coarse linen of hemp--that I was dirty and filthy and ignorant and coarse. I forgot myself: I only remembered my love--my love immense as the sky, omnipotent as Deity. I fell on my knees before her. I only cried with stifled voice, "I am yours! I am yours!" I did not even ask her to be mine. I was her slave, her tool, her servitor, her thing, to be cherished or rejected as she would. I shivered, I sobbed. I had never known before, it seemed to me, what love could be; and it made a madman of me. All the while she said nothing: she let me kiss her gown, her feet, the stone floor on which she stood. Suddenly and abruptly she said only, "You are a droll creature: you love me, really--you?" Then I spoke, beside myself the while. I remember nothing that I said: she heard me in silence, standing erect above me where I kneeled. The light was very faint; the lamp swung to and fro on its bronze chain; I saw only the eyes of the woman burning their will into mine. She bent her head slightly: her voice was very low. She said only, "I have known it a long time. Yes, you love me, but how? How?" How? I knew no words that could tell her. Human tongues never have language enough for that: a look can tell it. I looked at her. She trembled for a moment as though I had hurt her. Soon she regained her empire over herself. "But how?" she muttered very low, bending over me her beautiful head, nearly touching mine. "But how? Enough to--?" She paused. Enough? Enough for what? Enough to deny heaven, to defy hell, to brave death and torment, to do all that a man could do: who could do more?