"How know you he wishes to depart?"
"How know you he wishes to remain?"
"His destiny is Rome. Here he will live—and here he will die!" the Senator spoke with slow emphasis. "But we have not yet agreed upon the signal," he continued with cold and merciless voice. "After the departure of the envoys you will lead the King into his favourite haunts, the labyrinth of the Minotaurus, to the little temple of Neptune. There I will in person await him. When you see the gleam of spearpoints in the thickets, you will wave your kerchief with the cry: 'For Rome and Crescentius.' No harm shall befall the youth,—unless he resist. He shall have honourable conduct to the guest chamber, prepared for him,—below."
And Crescentius pointed downward with the thumb of his right hand.
Stephania's bosom rose and fell in quick respiration.
"I am not accustomed to prefer a request and be denied," she said proudly, her face the pallor of death. "Is this your last word, my lord?"
Crescentius met her gaze unflinchingly.
"It is my last," he replied. "Yet one choice remains with you: You may betray the King,—or the Senator of Rome!"
He turned to go, but something whispered to him to stay. At that moment he despised himself for having imposed upon his wife a task, against which Stephania's loftier nature had rebelled and he inwardly cursed the hour which had ripened the seed and him, who had sown it. Gazing after Stephania's retreating form, all the love he bore her surged up into his heart as he cried her name.
Arrested by his voice, Stephania turned and paused for a moment swift as thought, but in that moment she seemed to read the very depths of his soul and the utter futility of further entreaty. Without a word she ascended the spiral stairway leading to the upper galleries and re-entered her own apartments, while with long and wistful gaze Crescentius followed the vanishing form of his wife.