“Well spoken!” he exclaimed. “If you have no love for him the rest is quite easy.”
“Though all love within me is dead, I yet have a woman’s heart, and womanly feeling,” she said. “I know that my beauty is only a curse; I am well aware that men who have admired me have been drawn irresistibly to their doom. Ah!” and she shuddered in shame, “it is terrible—terrible!”
“Yet why should you regret?” he queried. “You are not of their world; you have nothing in common with them. You have been given beauty, the most marvellous, perhaps, in all the world; diabolic beauty, which causes you to be remarked wherever you go; which has caused the downfall of the upright, and has wrecked the lives of those who trust in the guardian Spirit of Good.”
“Yes, I know,” she answered quickly. “Yet I am tired of it all. I am aware that my power for the working of evil among my fellow-creatures is greater than that of any other person of flesh and blood; that at my touch objects held sacred are defiled and consumed, that sight of my face may cause a veritable saint to turn from his asceticism and become an evil-doer. All this I know, alas! All this is due to the influence of evil, which once I might have striven against, had I wished.”
“You possess the beauté du Diable,” he said. “Are you not the daughter of Satan?”
“If I am I decline to commit any further crime at your bidding,” she answered, with indignation. “You have held me enthralled until now, but I tell you that you have strained the bond until it will ere long break. Then I shall be free.”
“I’m pleased that you have such pleasant anticipations,” he replied. “A woman who once gives herself over to the Evil One can never regain her freedom.”
“But she can refuse to increase the enormity of her sin by committing crime at the bidding of the man who holds her beneath his thrall,” she answered.
“You know what such refusal means?” he said in a threatening tone.
“Yes—death. Well, I do not fear it. Within me a new love has been awakened. I now love for the first time in all my life.”