"Fetch a glass for yourself," he said, as she uncorked the grey cobwebby bottle.
"Oh, please, Herr, I'd rather not. It's too strong."
"Nonsense! you will get used to it."
"Perhaps, Herr."
He poured out the wine. The dark-gold fluid foamed sparkling into the slender-stemmed emerald rummers, which, perishable as they were, had been saved from the ruins.
"Clink!" he said.
The glasses as they came in contact produced music like muffled bells.
"The curse of a priest has to-day coupled me with her," he thought, and his eyes sought hers and probed their depths. "How extraordinary! how monstrous!" This woman was to be part of his existence, the old man had said. This woman--why, oh, why this one?
"A curse is a sanction," he meditated further. "Something that never happened, and never would have happened, through him has been substantiated and vouched for before Heaven as if it were an established fact."
And again his thoughts began to encroach stealthily on that forbidden ground, in whose insurmountable barriers the preacher's words themselves had quarried access. "You are master," he repeated the formula over and over to himself, "she the servant;" and then he added, "What is more, she is your slave, and so let it be."