“This is our second interview, lord earl,” she said, while he sat speechless. “The first time I pleaded on my knees to you, and you spurned me from you as if I had been a dog. This time it should be your turn to plead; for you have almost as much at stake as I had then. If you do not choose to do so, that is your affair, not mine. The third time—when it comes—you will have realized what a gipsy’s revenge is like.”
“Oh, woman! if there be one spark of human nature in your savage breast, for God’s sake, spare that child!” cried the earl, wrought up to a perfect agony by her words.
She stepped back a pace, and looked at him for an instant in silence. At last:
“I pleaded to you on my knees,” she said, with an icy smile.
Her words gave him hope. The proud man fell on his knees before her, and held up his clasped hands in supplication. The high born Earl De Courcy knelt in wildest agony at the feet of the outcast gipsy!
Her hour of triumph had come. Folding her arms over her breast, she looked down upon him as he knelt there, with a look no words can ever describe.
“Spare her—spare her! For God’s sake, spare that child!”
There was no reply. Erect, rigid and moveless as a figure in stone, she stood, looking down upon him with her blazing eyes.
“Slay her, if you will; let her go to heaven guileless and unstained—anything rather than the doom you have destined for her!”
Still no reply. With that triumphant smile—a smile such as Satan himself might have worn—she looked steadily and quietly down at the man at her feet.