thing move you, Dubravnik? Can nothing change you from this
purpose of yours? Must you, because you have given your word to a
tyrant, remain loyal to him? Must you, in spite of the great love you
have for me, remain true to him who is my enemy?"

"I must; for your sake as well as for mine."

"For my sake!" she laughed, and it was not a pleasant laugh to hear,
especially at that moment, and following as it did upon all the
tenderness that had passed between us. "For my sake! Why Dubravnik, it
is for my sake that I ask you to take the oath."

"Zara," I said, choosing my words deliberately, "last night in the
glass covered garden, where the colored lights were glowing, I heard
you utter words which I can never forget, and which I have thought upon
many times since I heard them. You repudiated, with all the intensity
of your soul, the methods which these nihilists employ to attain their
ends. You called them murderers, assassins, scoundrels, cutthroats,
defamers of character, and many other things which I need not name.
What you did not accuse them of, in words, you charged them with, by
implication; and now you ask me to become one with them; and not only
that, to deny my manhood and my honor by repudiating my oath to
another."

"I asked you to protect yourself and me," she said, simply, but with a
coldness and a suggestion of hardness in her tone, that had been
entirely absent from it until that instant.

"I will do that, Zara. I will save you, and I will save myself. I will
save you from yourself. There will be a way. I have not yet determined
upon what it will be, but I will find a means."

Suddenly she slipped to the floor, upon her knees before me, and with
clasped hands upraised, in an attitude of supplication, she cried aloud
in a very agony of intensity.

"Oh, my love, do as I ask you to do. Take the oath of nihilism."

CHAPTER XIV

THE SCORN OF A WOMAN

It seemed at that moment as if I could not deny her. Every impulse of
my soul cried out to me that it would be a very little thing to do,
after all.

It was not the danger which threatened, that influenced me, not at all
that; it was her own supplication. The danger, and our own necessities,
were very real for her, even if I, in my secret heart, made little of
them.

For a moment I think I was undecided, but then the full force of what
such an act would mean, the full realisation of what I would become in
my own eyes by so stultifying myself