"I give his
message; the rest lieth with you and him."

"Never with me!" the girl exclaimed. She broke into hard dry sobs that
racked her. Nicanor watched, quite at a loss what to say or do.

"He hath--he hath threatened force and the rack if I refuse," she
sobbed.

"The rack is a bad thing to know!" said Nicanor, thinking of what he had
seen in the room at the end of the passage. He spoke with all sincerity,
being no better than his time.

"Ay, but there is something worse!" Eldris flashed back. "I would rather
face my lord in the torture-chamber; I would rather be broken on the
wheel and die the death--" She shuddered, and again hid her face. "And
there is no way out of it but death. What can I do, a slave?"

The old bitter cry, wrung from the lips of many that the word of the
Nations' Law might be fulfilled--wrung from the lips of Nicanor himself.
He knew the full measure of its bitterness, and somewhere in him an
answering chord stirred and woke to life. He put his hand on her
shoulder.

"See then, if that be thy feeling,--though them knowest not the rack!--I
too am a slave, but it may be that I can help thee." The girl stilled
her sobs to listen. "Hito is a fat swine. It would give me great joy to
foil him."

"I have tried to move him," she said, with a weary hopelessness more
suggestive than many words. "It is because I struggle--" She stopped,
biting her lips, her eyes dark with misery. "It is not me he would have
now, but his way," she said forlornly.

"For me to take thy refusal would do no good," said Nicanor, his voice
reflective. "Tell thy lady; surely she will give thee protection."

"Often I have tried to do that," Eldris answered. "Always Nerissa or
other women are there to know what I would have with her; and always
they say it is not for me to talk with her unless she gives
command--that I am to tell them and they will carry the word to her. And
when I tell,--" she faltered, with drooping head,--"they laugh, and call
me fool, and ask why I should hold myself too good to do as others have
done, and say our lady is not to be troubled with a thing such as this.
That is what they say, and they are worse than he. And I fear him! Oh, I
fear him!" She clenched her hands tightly across her breast and shivered
with closed eyes. "By day I go in dread lest he give command to seize
me; by night I start awake lest I see his face grinning in the dark,
even though for weeks at a time he will give me peace