"You scorn me!" she said in fierce, panting accents, that scarcely rose above an angry whisper. "You make a mockery of my anguish and despair--holding yourself aloof with your prated virtue! But you shall suffer for it! I am your match! You shall not spurn me a third time! I have humbled myself in the dust before you, I, Theodora--and you have spurned the love I have offered you--you have spurned Theodora--for that white marble statue whom I should strangle before your very eyes were she here! You shall not see her again, my Lord Tristan. Her fate is sealed from this moment. On the altars of Satan is she to be sacrificed on to-morrow night!" Tristan listened like paralyzed to her words, unable to move. She saw her opportunity. She sprang at him. Her arms coiled about him. Her moist kisses seared his lips. "Oh Tristan--Tristan," she pleaded, "forgive me, forgive! I know not what I say! I hunger for the kisses of your lips, the clasp of your arms! Do you know--do you ever think of your power? The cruel terrible power of your eyes, the beauty that makes you more like an angel than man? Have you no pity? I am well nigh mad with jealousy of that other whom you keep enshrined in your heart! Could she love, like I? She was not made for you--I am! Tristan--come with me--come--" Tighter and tighter her arms encircled his neck. The moonbeams showed him her eyes alight with rapture, her lips quivering with passion, her bosom heaving. The blood surged up in his brain and a red mist swam before his eyes. With a supreme effort Tristan released himself. Flinging her from him, he rushed out of the rotunda as if pursued by an army of demons. If he remained another moment he knew he was lost. A lightning bolt shot down from the dark sky vault close beside him as he reached the gardens, and a peal of thunder crashed after in quick succession. It drowned the delirious outburst of laughter that shrilled from the rotunda where Theodora, with eyes wide with misery and madness, stared as transfixed down the path where Tristan had vanished in the night. CHAPTER XI THE BLACK MASS The night was sultry and dismal. Dense black clouds rolled over the Roman Campagna, burning blue in the flashes of jagged lightnings and the low boom of distant thunder reverberated ominously among the hills and valleys of Rome, when three men, cloaked and wearing black velvet masks, skirted the huge mediæval wall with which Pope Leo IV had girdled the gardens of the Vatican and, passing along the fortified rampart which surrounded the Vatican Hill, plunged into the trackless midnight gloom of deep, branch-shadowed thickets. Not a word was spoken between them. Silently they followed their leader, whose tall, dark form was revealed to them only among the dense network of trees and the fantastic shapes of the underbrush, when a flash of white lightning flamed across the limitless depths of the midnight horizon.