Page:In the name of a woman (1900).djvu/138

 "Will you help me to my revenge upon the woman Christina?"

"What do you mean by revenge?"

"Death," she cried fiercely.

"I would slay you with my own hand first," I answered, the passion in me rushing to utterance.

She laughed again vindictively and hatefully.

"So it is true, then, she has bewitched you. I might have known it. I told you and warned you that she was a vampire using up men's lives with the unpitying remorselessness of a wild beast. And you are her latest lover, I suppose!"

The slander suggested by her words maddened me.

"I can hear no more, Madam," I said sternly.

She threw up her head with a gesture of pride.

"Do you order me to leave your house—knowing the consequences?"

I was in sore perplexity. She was a devil and she looked it as she stared at me, her lovely eyes glowing with rage and hate and menace.

"If you have more to say it must be at another time, when you are in a different mood," I returned.

She seemed about to burst forth again in her wild, vehement way, but as suddenly changed her mood and said:

"I understand. You wish to find a bridge over as dangerous a chasm as a man ever yet had to cross. I will see you again; but next time it will be to hear from you that you accept my terms. You are not a man to walk open-eyed to sheer ruin. I will go."

And as she left me, sweeping out of the room, with a challenging, defiant, triumphant smile, I could almost have found it in me to kill her.