"What is it you desire?" he questioned after a pause.
"If you possess the knowledge with which the vulgar credit you," the woman said slowly, not without an air of mockery in her tone, "I hardly need reveal to you the motives which prompted this visit! You knew them, ere I came, even as you knew of my coming!"
"You speak truly," said Hormazd slowly, now completely master of himself. "For even to the hour it was revealed to me!"
The woman scanned him with a searching look.
"Yet I had confided in none!" she said musingly. "Tell me then who I am!"
"You are Theodora!"
"When have we met before?"—
"Not in this life, but in a previous existence. Our souls touched then, predestined to cross each other on a future plane."
She removed her silken vizor and faced him.
The dark eyes at once challenged and besought. No sculptor could have chiselled those features on which a divinity had recklessly squandered all it had to bestow for good or for evil. No painter could have reproduced the face which had wrought such havoc in the hearts of men.