n a
little room half-lighted only, that I had never seen before. It was a
scented and a beautiful place, in one corner of which a white statue
gleamed, that of a Venus kissing Cupid, who folded one wing about her
head, and through the open window-place the moonlight shone and floated
the murmur of the sea.

The double doors were shut, for aught I knew locked, and with her own
hands Irene drew the curtains over them. Near the open window, to which
there was no balcony, stood a couch.

"Sit yonder, Olaf," she said, "for here there is no ceremony; here we
are but man and woman."

I obeyed, while she busied herself with the curtains. Then she came and
sat herself down on the couch also, leaning against the end of it in
such a fashion that she could watch me in the moonlight.

"Olaf," she said, after she had looked at me a while, rather strangely,
as I thought, for the colour came and went upon her face, which in that
light seemed quite young again and wonderfully beautiful, "Olaf, you are
a very brave man."

"There are hundreds in your service braver, Empress; cowards do not take
to soldiering."

"I could tell you a different story, Olaf; but it was not of this kind
of courage that I talked. It was of that which made you offer to eat
the poisoned fig in place of Constantine. Why did you do so? It is true
that, as things have happened, he'll remember it in your favour, for
I'll say this of him, he never forgets one who has saved him from harm,
any more than he forgets one who has harmed him. But if you had eaten
you would have died, and then how could he have rewarded you?"

"Empress, when I took my oath of office I swore to protect both the
Augustus and the Augusta, even with my life. I was fulfilling my oath,
that is all."

"You are a strange man as well as a brave man to interpret oaths so
strictly. If you will do as much as this for one who is nothing to you,
and who has never paid you a gold piece, how much, I wonder, would you
do for one whom you love."

"I could offer no more than my life for such a one, Empress, could I?"

"Someone told me--it may have been you, Olaf, or another--that once you
did more, challenging a heathen god for the sake of one you loved, and
defeating him. It was added that this was for a man, but that I do not
believe. Doubtless it was for the sake of Iduna the Fair, of whom you
have spoken to me, whom it seems you cannot forget although she was
faithless to you. It is said that th