A horrible terror seized on me. I said nothing. I was stupefied. The gloomy shadows of the chamber surrounded us like a mystic vapor; the pale figures of the tapestries seemed like the ghosts arisen from the grave to witness against us; the oppressive heat of the night hour lay on our heads like an iron hand. A phantom parted us: the spectre of a cowardly crime had come between us. "You do not love me," she said slowly. She grew impatient, angered, feverish: a dumb rage began to work in her. She had no fear. I drew my breath with effort. It seemed as if some one were strangling me. Kill him! Kill him! These ghastly words re-echoed in my ears. Kill an old and feeble man? It was worse than a crime: it was a cowardice. "You do not love me," she repeated with utter scorn. "Go--go!" A cry to her sprang from my very soul: "Anything else, anything but that! Ask my own life, and you shall have it." "I ask what I wish." As she answered me thus she drew herself in all her full height upward under the faint radiance from the lamp. Her magnificent beauty shone in it like a grand white flower of the datura under the suns of autumn. A disdain without bounds, without limit, without mercy, gleamed from her eyes. She despised me--a man of the people, a public wrestler, a bravo, only made to kill at his mistress's order, only of use to draw the stiletto in secrecy at the whim and will of a woman. I was Italian, yet I dared not slay a feeble old man in the soft dark of a summer night, to find my reward on the breast of his wife. Silence fell between us. Her eyes of scorn glanced over me, and all her beauty tempted me and cried to me, "Kill, kill, kill! and all this is thine!" Then her eyes filled with tears, her proud loveliness grew humble, and, a supplicant, she stretched out her arms to me: she cried, "Ah, you love me not: you have no pity. I may live and die here: you will not save me. You are strong as the lions are--you are so strong, and yet you are afraid." I shook in all my limbs. Yes, I was afraid--I was afraid of her, afraid of myself. I shivered: she looked at me always, her burning eyes now humid and soft with tears. "In open war, in combat, all you wish," I said to her slowly. "But an old man--in secret--to be his assassin--" My voice failed me. I saw the light in the lamp that swung above, oscillating between us: it seemed to me like the frail life of Taddeo Marchioni that swung on a thread at our will. She drew herself upward once more. Her tears were burned up in the fires of a terrible dumb rage. She cried aloud, "You are a coward. Go!"