"Let me then prove my love, Lady Theodora, most beautiful of all women on earth! Set the task! Show me how to win back that which I have lost! Let me become your utter slave." And, so saying, he swept the unresisting woman into his grasp, and as her body lay motionless against his breast the sight of her lips so close to his own sent the hot blood hurtling through his fevered brain. Theodora shuddered in his embrace. He kissed her, again and again, and her wet lips roused in him all the demoniacal passions of his nature. "Speak," he stammered, "what must I do to prove to you the love which is in my heart--the passion that burns my soul to crisp, as the fires of hell the souls of the damned?" Theodora's eyes were closed, as if she hesitated to speak the words that her lips had framed. He, Tristan, had brought her to this pass. He had denied, insulted her, he had made a mock of her in the eyes of this man, who was kneeling at her feet, bond slave of his passions. By his side no task would have seemed too great of accomplishment. And whatever the fruits of her plotting he was to have shared them. How she hated him; and how she hated that woman who had come between them. As for him whose stammering words of love tumbled from his drunken lips, Theodora could have driven her poniard through his heart without wincing in the act. "If you love me then, as you say," she whispered at last, "revenge me on him who has put this slight upon me!" A baleful light shone in Basil's eyes. "He dies this very night." She raised her hands with a shudder. "No--no! Not a quick death! He would die as another changes his garment--with a smile.--No! Not a quick death! Let him live, but wish he were dead a thousand times. Strike him through his honor. Strike him through the woman he loves." For a pace Basil was silent. Could Theodora have read his thoughts at this moment the weapon would not have dropped from her nerveless grasp. "Ah!" he said, and a film seemed to pass over his eyes in the utterance. "There is nothing that shall be left undone--through his honor--through the woman he loves." She utterly abandoned herself to him now, suffering his endearments and kisses like a thing of stone and thereby rousing his passions to their highest pitch. She could have strangled him like a poisonous reptile that defiled her body, but, after having suffered his embrace for a time, she suddenly shook herself free of him. "My lord--what of our plans? How much longer must I wait ere the clarions announce to Rome that the Emperor's Tomb harbors a new mistress? What of Alberic? What of Hassan Abdullah, the Saracen?" Basil was regarding her with a mixture of savage passion, doubt, incredulity and something like fear. "The death-hounds are on Alberic's scent," he said at last, with an effort to steady his voice, and hold in leash his feelings, which threatened to master him, as his eyes devoured the woman's beauty.--"Hassan Abdullah is even now in Rome."