“I mean—you’ll not be angry with me?—I mean that I would have us married not only by a Christian priest, and in the Christian manner, but also and first of all by a Rabbi, and in accordance with the Jewish rites.” Upon the words, she felt his encircling arms turn limp, and relax their grip upon her, whereupon she clung to him the more tightly. “Rodrigo! Rodrigo! If you truly love me, if you truly want me, you’ll not deny me this condition, for I swear to you that once I am your wife you shall never hear anything again to remind you that I am of Jewish blood.” His face turned ghastly pale, his lips writhed and twitched, and beads of sweat stood out upon his brow. “My God!” he groaned. “What do you ask? I... I can’t. It were a desecration, a defilement.” She thrust him from her in a passion. “You regard it so? You protest love, and in the very hour when I propose to sacrifice all to you, you will not make this little sacrifice for my sake, you even insult the faith that was my forbears’, if it is not wholly mine. I misjudged you, else I had not bidden you here to-day. I think you had better leave me.” Trembling, appalled, a prey to an ineffable tangle of emotion, he sought to plead, to extenuate his attitude, to move her from her own. He ranted torrentially, but in vain. She stood as cold and aloof as earlier she had been warm and clinging. He had proved the measure of his love. He could go his ways. The thing she proposed was to him, as he had truly said, a desecration, a defilement. Yet to have dreamed yourself master of ten million maravedis, and a matchless woman, is a dream not easily relinquished. There was enough cupidity in his nature, enough neediness in his condition, to make the realization of that dream worth the defilement of the abominable marriage rites upon which she insisted. But fear remained where Christian scruples were already half-effaced. “You do not realize,” he cried. “If it were known that I so much as contemplated this, the Holy Office would account it clear proof of apostasy, and send me to the fire.” “If that were your only objection it were easily overcome,” she informed him coldly. “For who should ever inform against you? The Rabbi who is waiting above-stairs dare not for his own life’s sake betray us, and who else will ever know?” “You can be sure of that?” He was conquered. But she played him yet awhile, compelling him in his turn to conquer the reluctance which his earlier hesitation had begotten in her, until it was he who pleaded insistently for this Jewish marriage that filled him with such repugnance. And so at last she yielded, and led him up to that bower of hers in which the conspirators had met. “Where is the Rabbi?” he asked impatiently, looking round that empty room. “I will summon him if you are quite sure that you desire him.” “Sure? Have I not protested enough? Can you still doubt me?”