hat once I am your wife
you shall never hear anything again to remind you that I am of Jewish
blood."

His face turned ghastly pale, his lips writhed and twitched, and beads
of sweat stood out upon his brow.

"My God!" he groaned. "What do you ask? I... I can't. It were a
desecration, a defilement."

She thrust him from her in a passion. "You regard it so? You protest
love, and in the very hour when I propose to sacrifice all to you, you
will not make this little sacrifice for my sake, you even insult the
faith that was my forbears', if it is not wholly mine. I misjudged you,
else I had not bidden you here to-day. I think you had better leave me."

Trembling, appalled, a prey to an ineffable tangle of emotion, he sought
to plead, to extenuate his attitude, to move her from her own. He ranted
torrentially, but in vain. She stood as cold and aloof as earlier she
had been warm and clinging. He had proved the measure of his love. He
could go his ways.

The thing she proposed was to him, as he had truly said, a desecration,
a defilement. Yet to have dreamed yourself master of ten million
maravedis, and a matchless woman, is a dream not easily relinquished.
There was enough cupidity in his nature, enough neediness in his
condition, to make the realization of that dream worth the defilement of
the abominable marriage rites upon which she insisted. But fear remained
where Christian scruples were already half-effaced.

"You do not realize," he cried. "If it were known that I so much as
contemplated this, the Holy Office would account it clear proof of
apostasy, and send me to the fire."

"If that were your only objection it were easily overcome," she informed
him coldly. "For who should ever inform against you? The Rabbi who is
waiting above-stairs dare not for his own life's sake betray us, and who
else will ever know?"

"You can be sure of that?"

He was conquered. But she played him yet awhile, compelling him in his
turn to conquer the reluctance which his earlier hesitation had begotten
in her, until it was he who pleaded insistently for this Jewish marriage
that filled him with such repugnance.

And so at last she yielded, and led him up to that bower of hers in
which the conspirators had met.

"Where is the Rabbi?" he asked impatiently, looking round that empty
room.

"I will summon him if you are quite sure that you desire him."

"Sure? Have I not protested enough? Can you still doubt me?"

"No," she sa