Page:Edward Prime-Stevenson - The Intersexes.djvu/356

 at your melancholy looks. All this has been hatching itself out in the house, for a good while! They want to shut you up, do they? Well—they'll pay for it to me, Reutler, when I go down stairs! To dare to lay a hand on my big brother Reutler!—and—just because he is in love with me! What idiots!"

He threw his arms now around Reutler, and hid his face in Reutler's bosom. Reutler began to think that it would be very difficult to kill him, now. He had no longer at hand that revolver that Eric had thrown away; and the poisons left in the laboratory were all slow. " There will be other way left for me but to strangle him!—to realize indeed all the impossible!" he thought.

But he smiled still, even in so thinking; caressing Paul's hair; while Paul began lamenting softly to him:

"What—is going—to become of us?"

"I do not know," murmured Reutler.

The boy had not yet marked the Are below them, confined, but gaining fast. "If they talk about.madness—if they only might shut us up in the same cell—God, Reutler! What sound is that! That noise under our feet here? Listen, listen, Reutler!"

The elder brother pressed the lad frantically to himself. "Dearest—the time has come to be brave!" he said.

"Oh, I know that " cried Paul-Eric, in a sudden revolt. " It's Corneille, with his 'Rodrigue, as tu du cœur?'—and so on! But no-no! Not this morning! Above all, not with such a dawn about us as this—a light that makes your face green! No, no—I don't want to die—to go down there—Reutler, when I'm only twenty—! But I wont have them shutting you up for a madman, for I won't live without you, Reutler—my big brother, my great Hercules! Suppose they come up stairs—they will kill us—"

"Eric—do you love me—very much?"

"How your heart beats, Reutler! You aren't a marble man any longer!" ……

"And if I ask of the Princess of Byzantium that just for me, her adorer, she would be such a superhuman creature in courage as never there was yet? If I ask her—to look death in the face—and to smile at it? Are we two going to lie to each other, to cheat each other,even to our last minutes?" Reutler gasped the words, kneelling down now in front of the idol.

Paul-Eric stood straight up, a figure for the theater; wonderful in his blue robe, with its flowers and chimæras. He held up his joined