“My Lord has already promised me the right to wear the yellow Llautu and to take my place among the nobles of the land. That would have been more than his slave had dared to hope for had not the service demanded of him been so great and full of danger. Mine is the only hand that can put the poison into the Spaniards’ meat and drink; but were I discovered--nay, even suspected--nothing less than a death of fiery torment would be mine. Therefore, Lord, to give me greater hope and a better heart in so deadly an enterprise, I pray thee add to thy promise the gratification of a love that has so far consumed my heart with hopeless longing.” He paused for a moment, and the agile intellect of Atahuallpa instantly went back to the scene of de Soto’s embassy at the hot springs, and he remembered the lad’s bold and lawless glances at the princess, and the disquiet, as she had afterwards told him, they had caused her. His black brows met suddenly over his eyes, and fixing a steady, staring gaze upon him, he said in a cold hard tone-- “Say on and tell me which it is of my handmaids’ handmaids that thou hast honoured with thy choice.” The note in the Inca’s voice and the flash in his eyes told Filipillo plainly that the crisis had come. One older or wiser or less ignorantly daring would have taken the warning and deferred the request, or asked only that his Lord should have given him a mate befitting the new rank that was to be his. But he, puffed up by the arrogant sense of the power which he knew to be his, lifted his head and said boldly-- “I love none of thy slaves, Lord. If I did those other masters of mine would give me as many as I needed. If I am to stand by thy favour among the other Children of the Blood I would wed only one of its daughters. Such a one does my heart already long for. Give me thy royal word that the Princess Pillcu-Cica----” Before he could say another word the skinny hand of the Palla was clasped tightly over his lips. The Inca had staggered back, his face purple-red with rage, stricken aghast by the bare mention of such a sacrilege as had never before even been thought of in the Land of the Four Regions.[14] He could find no words in his speechless wrath, but the voice of the Palla broke the silence with a low, fierce hissing sound as, with the sudden strength of passion, she flung him back against the wall--