Page:In the name of a woman (1900).djvu/332

 I saw him glance about him as if in desperate search of some faint hope of escape from the menacing knife. She saw the glance too, and laughed, a fiend's laugh, scornful, sneering, and utterly loathsome.

"You may look where you will, but you remember your own condition—alone in the house. Alone, that you might not be seen with me, or perhaps might trap me with more of your damnable treachery. Well, you've had your way, and we are alone; but it's the trapper who is trapped, the spider who is caught in his own web. I'm glad you are afraid of death. I thought it would be so, you are so prompt and quick to order the deaths of others. And now you want to find proofs that will enable you to have this Englishman put out of your way, something to give a colour to your order for his removal; and when your men had searched here and found nothing strong enough, you swallowed the bait I put to you, to guide you to the place where you should find all you wanted and more."

"He is no friend of yours."

"What is that to me? You are my enemy, and here helpless in my power. The great, powerful, ruthless, implacable enemy of my Prince and of Bulgaria here alone, fastened like a child to a chair by the hand of a woman. Where is your power now? Will it help you to unfasten even a strand of your bonds? Will it bring a single soul to your aid? Will it stay by a second the plunge of my knife, or turn by so much as a hair's breadth the point from your heart? Were you as feeble as the meanest and weakest of your victims, you could not be more helpless than alone here with me."

The bloodthirsty fury of this unsexed demon was a hateful sight. Had she plunged her knife into the