But as the young Bishop sprang up, a shadow fell athwart the morning light streaming in beams of gold across his church into his cloister. It was the shadow of the woman clad all in black; the woman he had noticed coming out from all-night vigil in the Temple of Diana and tossing the gold and bronze coins to the beggar child, whom her rough jerk had thrown down the marble steps. She stood in the shadow of the gold light gazing at him. She was not young. He knew by her hair and fair skin that like himself, she was Greek; but there was something almost sibylline in her tense silence. Her skin was pale as white wax. Her lips were parted and painted, showing teeth white as pearls; and in her great dark eyes were both the insolence and unfathomable sadness of a woman fleeing in vain from the skeleton clutch of age and catching in vain at the rainbow hours of youth. She was measuring the strength of an almost feline cunning against the strength of his clarity before she spoke; and there was that in her, which could bait cunning with flesh and set a man guessing of her past. She was richly clad and decked in jewels, from the pearls in her hair to the jade in the clasp of her sandals. She smiled a slow smile with her lips, which had no reflex of joy in her eyes, than which is no sadder smile on earth—’twas like a mask on a death face. “I wish you good morrow, Sirrah,” she said. “Not—‘Sirrah,’” quietly answered the Bishop Onesimus in a silent rebuke to familiar approach, “nor much need to wish good morning when God gives free such day as this.” She winced but did not retreat. “How should I address you?” she asked smiling faintly. “In sincerity and truth, as I shall answer you, Lady. If you speak truth to a liar, it conceals you best, for he takes all truth for lie. If you speak lie to a liar, it accomplishes nothing; for he regards all words as lies.” She winced this time and glanced away. “I wait for you to invite me to be seated,” she said. “The empty chair has already invited you, Lady.” He waited. She seated herself, but had lost her air of insolence and no longer baited her dark eyes with a flicker of dare to a man’s guess of her past. Into them had come the terrible pleading of a dumb brute for respite from unseen foe. “What can I do for you, Lady?” asked the young Bishop. Into her face came the wan wistful smile of a gambler’s last cast of the dice. Her glance fell. She leaned forward across the table.