“I am avenged!” she went on, in thrilling accents--“And in a way that satisfies me. My lover that was,--never a true lover at best,--is my lover still--but with such limitations as are torture to a man whose only sense of love is--Desire! My beauty fills him with longing,--the thought of me ravages his soul and body--it occupies every thought and every dream!--and with this passion comes the consciousness of age. Age!--the great breakdown!--the end of all for _him_!--I have willed that he shall feel its numbing approach each day,--that he shall know the time is near when his step shall fail, his sight grow dim,--when the rush of youthful life shall pass him by and leave him desolate. Yes!--I am avenged!--he is ‘old enough now to realise that we are better apart!’” Her eyes glowed like stars,--her whole face was radiant. Dimitrius gazed at her almost sternly. “You are pitiless!” he said. She laughed. “As _he_ was,--yes!” And rising to her full height, she stood up like a queen. She wore a robe of dull amber stuff interwoven with threads of gold,--a small circlet of diamonds glittered in her hair, and Chauvet’s historic Eastern jewel, the “Eye of Rajuna,” flamed like fire on her white neck. “Féodor Dimitrius,” she said,--and her voice had such a marvellously sweet intonation that he felt it penetrate through every nerve--“You say, and you say rightly, that ‘so far as I am woman’--my circumstances are not changed from what they were when I first came to you in Geneva. But only ‘so far as I am woman.’ Now--how do you know I am woman at all?” He lifted himself in his chair, gripping both arms of it with clenched nervous hands. His dark eyes flashed a piercing inquiry into hers. “What do you mean?” he half whispered. “What--what would you make me believe?” She smiled. “Oh, marvellous man of science!” she exclaimed--“Must I teach you your own discovery? You, who have studied and mastered the fusion of light and air with elemental forces and the invisible whirl of electrons with perpetually changing forms, must I, your subject, explain to you what you have done? You have wrested a marvellous secret from Nature--you can unmake and remake the human body, freeing it from all gross substance, as a sculptor can mould and unmould a statue,--and do you not see that you have made of me a new creature, no longer of mere mortal clay, but of an ethereal matter which has never walked on earth before?--and with which earth has nothing in common? What have such as I to do with such base trifles as human vengeance or love?” He sprang up and approached her. “Diana,” he said slowly--“If this is true,--and may God be the arbiter!--one thing in your former circumstances is altered--you are not ‘without claims on your time and your affections.’ _I_ claim both! I have made you as you are!--you are mine!” She smiled proudly and retreated a step or two.