He remained for a moment inert; then, with an almost savage boldness, threw his arm about her.

“Have everything your own way, Ziska!” he said in quick, fierce accents.  “I will accept all your fancies, and humor all your caprices.  I will grant that you do not love me—­I will even suppose that I am repellent to you,—­but that shall make no difference to my desire!  You shall be mine!—­willing or unwilling!  If every kiss I take from your lips be torn from you with reluctance, yet those kisses I will have!—­you shall not escape me!  You—­you, out of all women in the world, I choose...”

“As your wife?” said Ziska slowly, her dark eyes gleaming with a strange light as she dexterously withdrew herself from his embrace.

He uttered an impatient exclamation.

“My wife!  Dieu!  What a banalite!  You, with your exquisite, glowing beauty and voluptuous charm, you would be a ’wife’—­that tiresome figure-head of utterly dull respectability?  You, with your unmatched air of wild grace and freedom, would submit to be tied down in the bonds of marriage,—­marriage, which to my thinking and that of many other men of my character, is one of the many curses of this idiotic nineteenth century!  No, I offer you love, Ziska!—­ ideal, passionate love!—­the glowing, rapturous dream of ecstasy in which such a thing as marriage would be impossible, the merest vulgar commonplace—­almost a profanity.”

“I understand!” and the Princess Ziska regarded him intently, her breath coming and going, and a strange smile quivering on her lips.  “You would play the part of an Araxes over again!”

He smiled; and with all the audacity of a bold and determined nature, put his arms round her and drew her close up to his breast.

“Yes,” he said, “I would play the part of an Araxes over again!”

As he uttered the words, an indescribable sensation of horror seized him—­a mist darkened his sight, his blood grew cold, and a tremor shook him from head to foot.  The fair woman’s face that was lifted so close to his own seemed spectral and far off; and for a fleeting moment her very beauty grew into something like hideousness, as if the strange effect of the picture he had painted of her was now becoming actual and apparent—­namely, the face of death looking through the mask of life.  Yet he did not loosen his arms from about her waist; on the contrary he clasped her even more closely, and kept his eyes fixed upon her with such pertinacity that it seemed as if he expected her to vanish from his sight while he still held her.

“To play the part of an Araxes aright,” she murmured then in slow and dulcet accents, “you would need to be cruel and remorseless, and sacrifice my life—­or any woman’s life—­to your own clamorous and selfish passion.  But you,—­Armand Gervase,—­educated, civilized, intellectual, and totally unlike the barbaric Araxes, could not do that, could you?  The progress of the world,