The duchess banged her hands together, and her eyes blazed with frustrated covetousness. "If you call him my lord again," she cried, "I shall hate you. He is my servant, my slave, my puppet; he shall believe what I please when he wakes. Why, he will not know that he has slept at all, and as for this trinket, how can he know what riches I hold in my treasury at Thebes? Give me my gift, sweet minion." Argathona looked straight into the face of Esclaramonde, and her eyes were bright and stern. "Do you love this man?" she asked, and she pointed with the hand that held the desirable apple to where Rainouart lay huddled on the table. Esclaramonde made a face of disdain. "Love is a word of many meanings. He is a prince and he is rich; he is young and he is comely. He is different from the others I have loved, and for the time he pleases me." Argathona's face was set and her voice was cold as she spoke again, asking the fateful question, "How did you come to care for this man?" The duchess gave a little laugh that brimmed with malicious memories. "I knew him first a while ago in France, when he was counted a cold monster, and indeed I failed to melt his ice, though I tried my liveliest. Then fate flung him at my feet the other day in the haunted wood." "And he loved you at once," Argathona asked, "loved you with all his heart and soul?" Esclaramonde flung back her crowned head and laughed mockingly at her questioner. "Am I not comely enough to be so loved?" she retorted, and Argathona, seizing sudden chance, bent her head in acquiescence. "If he love you so well," she sighed, "were it not shame for us to do him wrong? Let us part now in honor, and when he wakes you will rejoice to be worthy of his loyal love." And Argathona made as if she would go from the room, but she was cunning, and the golden apple gleamed through the net of her fingers. Rage flamed hotly in the eyes and cheeks of Esclaramonde. "You question like a cold priest," she complained, "when you should clasp like a warm lover. But you can go if you please when you give me the trinket." And she held out her hand imperiously, but Argathona still kept the apple. Now Esclaramonde was very loath to lose her lover though she professed indifference, and she was firmly determined to gain the apple. "Nay," said Argathona, craftily, "I am a Greek and give nothing for nothing. But I would your lord were not so single-hearted a lover, for my vows deny me to wrong him." Esclaramonde clinched her hands so tightly that the nails of her fingers hurt her palms. "You are a precise fool," she raged; "but you can send your fastidious conscience to sleep. For though my husband loves me now and thinks he never loved other woman, he gave his great heart like a baby to some country girl in the woods."