“True!” she answered,--“And only by your own falsehood can you change them into words of death!” Signing his name ‘Max Graub,’ he looked up and met her searching gaze. Something there was in the magnetic depth of her eyes that strangely embarrassed him, for he stepped back hastily as though intimidated. Axel Regor took the pen from his hand, and wrote his name, or rather scrawled it carelessly, almost impatiently,--showing neither hesitation nor repugnance to this unusual method of subscribing a document. “You are acting on compulsion!” said Lotys, addressing him in a low tone; “Your compliance is in obedience to some other command than ours! And--you will do well to remain obedient!” Axel Regor gave her an amazed glance,--but she paid no heed to it, and binding her arm with her kerchief, let her long white sleeve fall over it. “So, you are enrolled among the sons of my blood!” she said, “So are you bound to me and mine!” She moved to the further end of the table and stood there looking round upon them all. Again the slow, sweet, half-disdainful smile irradiated her features. “Well, children!--what else remains to do? What next? What next can there be but drink--smoke--talk! Man’s three most cherished amusements!” She sat down, throwing back her heavy cloak on either side of her. Her hair had come partly unbound, and noticing a tress of it falling on her shoulder, she drew out the comb and let it fall altogether in a mass of gold-brown, like the tint of a dull autumn leaf, flecked here and there with amber. Catching it dexterously in one hand, she twisted it up again in a loose knot, thrusting the comb carelessly through. “Drink--smoke--talk, Sergius!” she repeated, still smiling; “Shall I ring?” Sergius Thord stood looking at her irresolutely, with the half-angry, half-pleading expression of a chidden child. “As you please, Lotys!” he answered. Whereupon she pressed an invisible spring under the table, which set a bell ringing in some lower quarter of the house. “Pasquin Leroy, Axel Regor, Max Graub!” she said--“Take your places for to-night beside me--newcomers are always thus distinguished! And all of you sit down! You are grouped at present like hungry wolves waiting to spring. But you are not really hungry, except for something which is not food! And you are not waiting for anything except for permission to talk! I give it to you--talk, children! Talk yourselves hoarse! It will do you good! And I will personate supreme wisdom by listening to you in silence!” A kind of shamed laugh went round the company,--then followed the scuffling of feet, and grating of chairs against the floor, and presently the table was completely surrounded, the men sitting close up together, and Sergius Thord occupying his place at their head.