"You do not go willingly?" Nicanor questioned, and took note of the exclamation she had used.
"You will not force me to him!" she gasped in terror, misunderstanding, and shrank from him.
"Not I! I am no man's procurer!" Nicanor said curtly. "I give his message; the rest lieth with you and him."
"Never with me!" the girl exclaimed. She broke into hard dry sobs that racked her. Nicanor watched, quite at a loss what to say or do.
"He hath—he hath threatened force and the rack if I refuse," she sobbed.
"The rack is a bad thing to know!" said Nicanor, thinking of what he had seen in the room at the end of the passage. He spoke with all sincerity, being no better than his time.
"Ay, but there is something worse!" Eldris flashed back. "I would rather face my lord in the torture-chamber; I would rather be broken on the wheel and die the death—" She shuddered, and again hid her face. "And there is no way out of it but death. What can I do, a slave?"
The old bitter cry, wrung from the lips of many that the word of the Nations' Law might be fulfilled—wrung from the lips of Nicanor himself. He knew the full measure of its bitterness, and somewhere in him an answering chord stirred and woke to life. He put his hand on her shoulder.
"See then, if that be thy feeling,—though them knowest not the rack!—I too am a slave, but it may be that I can help thee." The girl stilled her sobs to listen. "Hito is a fat swine. It would give me great joy to foil him."
"I have tried to move him," she said, with a weary hopelessness more suggestive than many words. "It is because I struggle—" She stopped, biting her lips, her eyes dark with misery. "It is not me he would have now, but his way," she said forlornly.