Will you go?"

"And what is to prevent me from delivering you over to safe keeping
before you do this deed?"

"You have no witness," answered Kafka with a smile. "You are a stranger
in the city and in this country, and I am rich. I shall easily prove
that you love Unorna, and that you wish to get rid of me out of
jealousy."

"That is true," said the Wanderer, thoughtfully. "I will go."

"Go quickly, then," said Israel Kafka, "for I shall follow soon."

As the Wanderer left the room he saw the Moravian turn toward the place
where the keen, splendid Eastern weapons hung upon the wall.

CHAPTER XVII

The Wanderer knew that the case was urgent and the danger great. There
was no mistaking the tone of Israel Kafka's voice nor the look in his
face. Nor did the savage resolution seem altogether unnatural in a man
of the Moravian's breeding. The Wanderer had no time and but little
inclination to blame himself for the part he had played in disclosing to
the principal actor the nature of the scene which had taken place in
the cemetery, and the immediate consequences of that disclosure, though
wholly unexpected, did not seem utterly illogical. Israel Kafka's nature
was eastern, violently passionate and, at the same time, long-suffering
in certain directions as only the fatalist can be. He could have loved
for a lifetime faithfully, without requital; he would have suffered in
patience Unorna's anger, scorn, pity or caprice; he had long before now
resigned his free will into the keeping of a passion which was degrading
as it enslaved all his thoughts and actions, but which had
something noble in it, inasmuch as it fitted him for the most heroic
self-sacrifice.

Unorna's act had brought the several seemingly contradictory elements of
his character to bear upon one point. He had realised in the same moment
that it was impossible for her to love him; that her changing treatment
of him was not the result of caprice but of a fixed plan of her own, in
the execution of which she would spare him neither falsehood nor insult;
that to love such a woman was the lowest degradation; that he could
nevertheless not destroy that love; and, finally, that the only escape
from his shame lay in her destruction, and that this must in all
probability involve his own death also. At the same time he felt that
there was something solemn in the expiation he was about to exact,
something that accorded well with the fierce traditions of ancient
Is