"Lord!" she cried again, flushing red in the light of the lanterns, "they put their foul hands upon me! They put their hands upon me!" The very present peril in which she might well have believed herself to stand seemed not to occur to her. It seemed that only those rough, befouling hands were in her mind. Her face gave once more its little, shivering twist of anger and repulsion.
"They shall be punished, child!" said Zuan Gradenigo, between tight lips. "Oh, they shall suffer for it, you may be sure. And now"—he took a turn away from her, for her great eyes were upon him again, level and unafraid—"now will you tell me who you are and how you came to be found with those barbarians to-night? Surely you can have no traffic with such. Surely you are a lady. I have seen that." And indeed he had seen, while the girl stood in her thin white shift, how beautifully she was made—deep-bosomed, slim-waisted, with tapering wrists and ankles, and round white throat. No common wench was there. There was good blood under that white skin of hers.
"Surely you are a lady," said young Zuan, but the girl bent her head from him.
"Nay, lord," she said, very low, "I am only—a serving-maid to the Princess Yaga."
The red flamed into Zuan's cheeks.
"That woman!" he cried. "You serve that vile fiend in human flesh, that royal strumpet, that wanton at whose name men spit? You?" The girl stared at him under her brows.
"Oh!" cried Zuan Gradenigo. "Where is God that hell could devise such a wrong? What was God doing that you should stray into such clutches and He not know? That—that monster of vice and uncleanness!" He pointed a shaking hand towards the south.
"There she sits," said he, "polluting the castle where Jacopo Corner has sat for so many years, where my grandfather sat before him, and his father before him. There she sits gloating; but, by God and St. Mark's lion! before this week is over I shall tear her head from her body and throw it to the dogs. Nay! better than that! I shall send it, in the name of Venice, to the ban who sent her here to shame us."
"Lord!" said the maid, very low—"lord! Oh, you do not know! You—speak wildly. You do not know what you say."