u will! And, I say, what a
decoy you will make! Jee-miny!"

He was carried away for a moment, but his face darkened swiftly.

"No! No reprieve. What do you think a fellow is--a scarecrow? All hat
and clothes and no feeling, no inside, no brain to make fancies for
himself? No!" he went on violently. "Never in his life will he go again
into that room of yours--never any more!"

A silence fell. He was gloomy with the torment of his jealousy, and did
not even look at her. She sat up and slowly, gradually, bent lower and
lower over him, as if ready to fall into his arms. He looked up at last,
and checked this droop unwittingly.

"Say! You, who are up to fighting a man with your bare hands, could
you--eh?--could you manage to stick one with a thing like that knife of
mine?"

She opened her eyes very wide and gave him a wild smile.

"How can I tell?" she whispered enchantingly. "Will you let me have a
look at it?"

Without taking his eyes from her face, he pulled the knife out of its
sheath--a short, broad, cruel double-edged blade with a bone handle--and
only then looked down at it.

"A good friend," he said simply. "Take it in your hand and feel the
balance," he suggested.

At the moment when she bent forward to receive it from him, there was
a flash of fire in her mysterious eyes--a red gleam in the white mist
which wrapped the promptings and longings of her soul. She had done it!
The very sting of death was in her hands, the venom of the viper in her
paradise, extracted, safe in her possession--and the viper's head all
but lying under her heel. Ricardo, stretched on the mats of the floor,
crept closer and closer to the chair in which she sat.

All her thoughts were busy planning how to keep possession of that
weapon which had seemed to have drawn into itself every danger and
menace on the death-ridden earth. She said with a low laugh, the
exultation in which he failed to recognize:

"I didn't think that you would ever trust me with that thing!"

"Why not?"

"For fear I should suddenly strike you with it."

"What for? For this morning's work? Oh, no! There's no spite in you for
that. You forgave me. You saved me. You got the better of me, too. And
anyhow, what good would it be?"

"No, no good," she admitted.

In her heart she felt that she would not know how to do it; that if it
came to a struggle, she would have to drop the dagger and fight with her
hands.

"Listen. When we are going about the world