I
ought to say, champion."

"Have a care," he replied, kindling up all at once into a sort of
frenzy--"have a care what you say or do. You move in darkness--you tread
on smothered fire."

"Do you threaten me?" said I.

"No; I do not threaten you. Look at your arm and mine--compare your
muscles with my shrunken and stunted frame," he cried, with an
expression of pain and bitterness; "I do not threaten you, but I warn
you--mark me, I warn you! Heed my warning, I beseech, I implore
you--nay, heed it for your life!"

I could not but admire the sibyl-like grandeur of his head and
outstretched arms as he uttered these strange words. His voice was
hoarse with some surging emotion; and if so poor a creature could have
been the recipient of a supernatural inspiration, he might have sat at
that moment for the portrait of one of the deformed soothsayers in a
tale of magic.

"Do I understand you correctly?" said I; "or are you only playing off
some new freak upon me? Answer me frankly one question, and I shall be
better able to comprehend the meaning of your mysterious menace. Are
you--but I know it is absurd, I feel that the question is very
ridiculous, only that your reply to it will, perhaps, set us both
right--do you love Astraea? I really can not conceive any thing short of
some such feeling to justify this violence."

"Love her? _I_ love _Astraea?_ If there be a mortal I hate in the core of
my heart, it is Astraea. Are you satisfied?" he replied, with an
expression of fiendish satisfaction in his face, as if he were glad of
the excuse for giving vent to his malignity.

"Hate her?" said I, calmly; "that is unreasonable: but the whole
discussion is unreasonable. I have given you my answer; none other shall
you have from me. So, good-night."

"One word," he said, leaping out of his chair into the middle of the
room. "One word before you go. I am a dwarf--do not delude yourself into
any contempt of me on that account. I know as well as you do my
disadvantages in the world; I am as conscious as you are of my physical
defects and shortcomings, my distorted spine, and the parsimony of
nature in all particulars when she made me. But I have passions like
other men; and I pursue them like other men, only, as I am shut out from
the summary and open process, I am compelled, perchance, to the choice
of dark and crooked means. Perhaps, too, my passions are all the more
turbulent and dangerous because they are pent up in an inca