She was white to the lips, and a new horror stared at him from her great dark eyes; her lovely bosom rose and fell in tumult. Yet still she sought to reason with him.
“They are not Jews—not one of them. Why, Perez is himself in holy orders. All of them are Christians, and...”
“Newly-baptized!” he broke in, sneering viciously. “A defilement of that holy sacrament to gain them worldly advantages. That is revealed by what passed here just now. Jews they were born, the sons of Jews, and Jews they remain under their cloak of mock Christianity, to be damned as Jews in the end.” He was panting now with fiery indignation; a holy zeal inflamed this profligate defiler. “God forgive me that ever I entered here. Yet I do believe that it was His will that I should come to overhear what is being plotted. Let me depart from hence.”
With a passionate gesture of abhorrence he swung towards the door. Her clutch upon his arm arrested him.
“Whither do you go?” she asked him sharply. He looked now into her eyes, and of all that they contained he saw only fear; he saw nothing of the hatred into which her love had been transmuted in that moment by his unsparing insults to herself, her race and her home, by the purpose which she clearly read in him.
“Whither?” he echoed, and sought to shake her off.
“Whither my Christian duty bids me.”
It was enough for her. Before he could prevent or suspect her purpose, she had snatched the heavy Toledo blade from his girdle, and armed with it stood between the door and him.
“A moment, Don Rodrigo. Do not attempt to advance, or, as Heaven watches us, I strike, and it maybe that I shall kill you. We must talk awhile before you go.”
Amazed, chapfallen, half-palsied, he stood before her, his fine religious zeal wiped out by fear of that knife in her weak woman’s hand. Rapidly to-night was she coming into real knowledge of this Castilian gentleman, whom with pride she had taken for her lover. It was a knowledge that was to sear her presently with self-loathing and self-contempt. But for the moment her only consideration was that, as a direct result of her own wantonness, her father stood in mortal peril. If he should perish through the deletion of this creature, she would account herself his slayer.