"I cannot!" she muttered faintly in her throat.
"Then let him die!" he said; and turned away.
Once again he smiled.
The hours passed; she did not move; stretched there, she wrestled with her agony as the fate-pursued wrestled with their doom on the steps of the temple, while the dread Eumenides drew round them and waited—waiting in cold patience for the slow sure end.
She arose and went to his side as a dying beast in the public roadway under a blow staggers to its feet to breathe its last.
"Let him die!" she muttered, with lips dry as the lips of the dead. "Let him die!"
Once more the choice was left to her. So men said: and the gods were dead.
An old man, with a vulture's eyes and bony fingers, and rags that were plague-stricken with the poisons of filth and of disease, had followed and looked at her in the doorway, and kicked her where she lay.
"He owes me twenty days for the room," he muttered, while his breath scorched her throat with the fumes of drink. "A debt is a debt. To-morrow I will take the canvas; it will do to burn. You shiver?—fool! If you chose, you could fill this garret with gold this very night. But you love this man, and so you let him perish while you prate of 'shame.' Oh-ho! that is a woman!"
He went away through the blackness and the stench, muttering, as he struck his staff upon each stair,—