"Ah, Dio!"
"Your cue!" mocked the fiddler into his ear, and melted away into the darkness.
The window was that of a room on the ground floor; the lady leaned out, her elbows on the sill; her face caught a slanting ray of moonlight. Was it possible for anything mortal to be so beautiful?
"Madam!" cried Steven, and that heart of his which was supposed to be but dry dust began to thump in hitherto unknown fashion.
"Hush, hush!" she whispered, a taper finger on her lip. "Ah, is it you, sir?"
He advanced into the ray that held her. He was not aware that he also looked goodly and romantic. Somewhere, in the darkness close by, the fiddler's bow crept over the strings. It was a sound so attenuated that it seemed to have no more substance than the light of the moon itself; it stole upon their ears so gently that it was as if they heard it not. His hand met her warm fingers—the fragrance from her curls mounted to his nostrils; she looked up at him and her eyes glistened.
Oh, fiddler, what bewitching music is this? What sweetness does it insinuate, what mysterious audacity counsel? There were those parted lips of hers, with white teeth gleaming through, and here was this youth who had never touched a woman's lips in love. Such a little way between his bent head and her upturned face...!
A door crashed behind her. She started from his timid hand. The thread of the music was broken like a floating gossamer.
Steven thought that the fiddler laughed. There was a faint exclamation. Heavens! did she also laugh? He saw—yes, he saw the inspector's hated outline over hers. She was drawn from the window by the shoulders, the shutters were clapped to in his face and bolted noisily. The yard billowed under his feet. All went red before his eyes. That was her room, and the man had followed her to it! Had he no youth in him, no blood in his veins? ... Why, he could taste it on his tongue! He pivoted round upon himself, made a blind rush for the entrance door, and dashed headlong against Ranger Schmidt's broad chest.
A French oath rang out. Then broken German: "Can the kerl not see where he is going?" Then, in the dark, the fiddler laughed again. Or was it his music? or were there lurking devils taunting, jeering, inciting? The young man never knew exactly what happened till a crack like a pistol-shot sprang upon the night, and he realized that his hand had found the broad, insolent face at last. The sound of that slap cleared the confusion in his own brain as a puff of wind clears a hanging mist. Schmidt gave a roar like a furious bull, but Steven met the onslaught of the uplifted whip with the science learned in London of Gentleman Jackson and there was a grip on either side which began for him in glorious defiance and ended in a struggle of life and death.