"Now, by heaven! you shall be mine, and, as for your lover, he shall die with red-hot flames around him—die amid the most horrid of tortures, and even while his screams for mercy are ringing in your ears, I will clasp you to my heart and take a hundred kisses for every one you refuse me now."
"Horror!"
"That will be no name for what he shall suffer, and all your tears and prayers and sorrow shall be of no avail toward his release, but his horrible groans be sweet music in my ears as well as those of the Indians."
"Oh, God! spare him. Oh! why has Heaven abandoned him to one whose heart is flint?"
"You have rightly named it, but you have made it so. It was as wax in your hands, but you taunted, mocked, and repulsed me. As I loved, even so can I hate."
"It shall not, must not be. I will appeal to the Indians themselves," she replied, wringing her hands in agony. "Even they must be less brutal than you."
"I have bought you of them," he answered with a smile of gratified malice. "You are mine, body and soul. Do you hear? body and soul! My wife you have got to be, and if it will make your future more happy to have your lover first burned at the stake, why, be it so. But remember now, as you will have to do in the hereafter, that his life is in your hands—that you send him to destruction when you might have saved him even from pain."
"Oh, God! save him—pity me—guide me."
"Think well and decide."
The terrible words almost drove her to distraction. She remembered with fearful minuteness how the great flames leaped, roared, danced, circled, and was rapidly giving way, when his hand touched the naked flesh of her shoulder and she instantly nerved herself, and with the stony countenance of despair, answered: