"With one foot chained to the rock the Gadianton robber fought and vanquished eight warriors."
III.
THE BALCONY.
Ahah threw herself in the hammock on the balcony that her apartment opened on. She was shaken with rage, but the more violent the passion the sooner does it consume itself. Destruction would have descended on the head of Hagoth, if it had appeared at that moment; as it was her anger had just three hours to cool.
The stars hung low in the tropic heavens; a nearby field was illumined by the phosphorescent glow of flitting fireflies; below a tree burst into a galaxy of white stars.
As she clenched her small hands until the nails cut the palms, Ahah was not in a mood to contemplate scenery.
"Flirting with a Lamanite frump, indeed! How do I know that Hagoth has not a dozen Indian loves among his own people?" Hitherto Ahah had been so engrossed by her condescension in loving a mere Lamanite, that the possibility of anyone else loving him had never occurred to her. That Hagoth had been whole souled in his devotion to her she admitted. Nothing wins a woman quite so quick as the knowledge that a man has staked his all on her. Else why had she stooped to love him?
Slowly she lived over their acquaintance; all the details were graven on her brain. It had been romantic from the start. The horses of the Lamanite king were running away, dragging the broken chariot behind them. The driver had been hurled out in turning the corner and Tubaloth himself was reeling, when the careening animals were stopped by the impact of a lithe body hurled full at their heads. The catapult was Hagoth who thereafter was knighted and received the order of the tiger, a distinction he valued less than the murmured thanks of a mother who caught up her little brown baby that had been playing in the road directly in the way of the runaway. Since then Ahah's every meeting with Hagoth had tightened the grip on her heart. Yet the thing that made her angriest of all was that she should care so much.