A girl in white, with the palm badge upon her shoulder, was standing there. The room had been dark; the sudden influx of the solar light from the library showed me the pallid face and blazing eyes of her whom I had least thought to see before me—Elizabeth! CHAPTER XIV THE HOUSE ON THE WALL She stared at me with eyes that seemed to see nothing; and then a look of recognition came into them, and a twitching smile upon her lips. She put her arms out and came unsteadily toward me. She threw her right arm back. I caught her hand as it swung downward, and the dagger’s razor edge grazed my shoulder. The next moment she was fighting like a trapped panther. I could not have imagined that such strength and fierceness existed in any woman. She twisted her wrists out of my grasp time and again, and we wrestled for the dagger till the blood from my slashed fingers fouled my priest’s robe. Each of the stabbing blows she dealt so wildly would have driven the dagger in to the hilt. I grappled with her, caught her right arm at last, and forced it upward, but we swayed to and fro for nearly a minute before I mastered her. Even then she had one last surprise in store, for, when she saw that she was beaten, she drew her dagger hand quickly backward, and I seized the point of the blade within an inch of her breast. I forced her fingers open brutally, and the steel fell to the floor. Then she wrested herself away, and crouched in the corner, watching me, motionless, but still ready to leap. Her gasping breaths were the only sound in the room. “Elizabeth!” I cried. “I am not here to harm you. Look at me; listen to me!” Her eyes were fixed on my face in terror that precluded speech. How she watched me! Only once did her glance waver, and that was toward the dagger on the floor. I kicked it backward with my heel. “Elizabeth, listen to me!” I implored her. “I did not know that you were here, and I do not know how you came here. I want to help you. I want to take you home to David!” “Ah!” she said, shuddering. “This is what you whites call a romance in the style of the first century B.C., a fashionable pastime, to dress yourselves as blues or grays and worm your way into the homes of your prospective victims, in order to study them, and see whether they suit your taste and are worth adding to your collection. I have read of that in the Council factory novels. But there was never any romance in it to me. So I appeared to suit you, after my father had taken you into his home so trustingly? You deceived him; but you never deceived me.” I saw her glance turn to the dagger again. “Elizabeth, you are talking nonsense,” I said, with an affectation of brusqueness. “Let us sit down in the next room, and I propose a compact. You shall take the dagger, provided you do not attempt to harm yourself with it till you have heard me. Is that agreed?”