I looked, I saw, I understood: it was her act.
I stooped; I touched the corpse; I turned the face to the light; I searched for a pulse of life, a breath. There was none: he was dead. A single blow had been given, and the blow had been sure. A ghastly grimace distended the thin lips of the toothless mouth; the eyes were starting from their orbits; the hands were clenched: it had been a death swift, silent, violent, terrible.
I drew out the knife, deep buried in the bone of the throat below the skull. It was my knife, the same with which I had slashed asunder the boughs of the vines in the day just gone in the vintage-fields. She had taken it, no doubt, from my girdle when I had fallen at her feet.
"I understand," I said to the dead man: "it is her work."
The dead mouth seemed to laugh.
A casement opened on the court. A voice cried aloud. The voice was hers: it cried for help. From the silent dwelling came a sound of hurrying feet: the flame of a torch borne in a peasant's hand fell red on the livid moonlight.
She came with naked feet, with unloosed hair, as though roused from her bed, beautiful in her disarray, and crying aloud, "An assassin! an assassin!"
I understood all. She meant to send me to the scaffold in her place. It was my knife: that would be testimony enough for a tribunal. Justice is blind.
She cried aloud: they seized me, and the dead man lay between us, stretched on the stones and bathed in blood. I looked at her: she did not tremble.
But she had forgotten that I was strong—strong with the strength of the lion, of the bull, of the eagle. She had forgotten. With a gesture I flung far away from me, against the walls, the men who had seized me: with a bound I sprang upon her. I took her in my arms in her naked loveliness, scarcely veiled by the disordered linen, by the loosened hair, and shining like marble in the glisten of the moon. I seized her in my arms; I kissed her on her lips; I pressed against my heart her beautiful white bosom. Then between her two breasts I plunged my knife, red with the blood of her dead lord. "I avenge Phœbus," I said to her.