“You are ugly!” she replied, quickly, in a contemptuous tone.
“Give me the ring on your finger,” said Rampal, “and I’ll give you another.”
She glanced with a gleaming eye at her fantastic ring of hammered silver, then at the insolent Christian, and said:
“A sound cudgelling about your loins is what I will give you, dog, if you don’t leave me!”
And she spat fiercely at him as if in disgust.
Rampal, somewhat abashed, abandoned the game.
This woman had a way of looking at people that disconcerted them. You would say that a sharp, threatening flame shot from her eyes. It penetrated your being, searched your heart, and you were powerless against it. She fathomed your glance, but you could not fathom hers—which, on the contrary, repelled you, turned you back like a solid wall. And, at such moments, she would stand proudly erect, her head thrown slightly back, her whole body poised, at once so sinuous and so rigid, that she might have been compared to a horned viper standing on his tail, fascinating his prey and preparing to spring.
“I can’t explain, Jacques, how that woman frightened me,” said Livette to Renaud. “My blood is still running cold!—She threatened me! And when that crown of thorns fell at my feet—Holy Mother!—I thought I was going to faint!”
“If I meet her,” Renaud replied, “she’ll find she has some one to settle with!”
“Let the heathen alone, Jacques! It isn’t well to have aught to do with the devil.”