u, I should deserve to die a thousand
deaths. Be wholly mine, and I will give you the right to kill me if I
am false. I myself will write a letter explaining certain reasons for
taking my own life; I will make my final arrangements, in short. You
shall have the letter in your keeping; in the eye of the law it will be
a sufficient explanation of my death. You can avenge yourself, and fear
nothing from God or men."

"What good would the letter be to me? What would life be if I had lost
your love? If I wished to kill you, should I not be ready to follow? No;
thank you for the thought, but I do not want the letter. Should I not
begin to dread that you were faithful to me through fear? And if a man
knows that he must risk his life for a stolen pleasure, might it not
seem more tempting? Armand, the thing I ask of you is the one hard thing
to do."

"Then what is it that you wish?"

"Your obedience and my liberty."

"Ah, God!" cried he, "I am a child."

"A wayward, much spoilt child," she said, stroking the thick hair,
for his head still lay on her knee. "Ah! and loved far more than he
believes, and yet he is very disobedient. Why not stay as we are? Why
not sacrifice to me the desires that hurt me? Why not take what I can
give, when it is all that I can honestly grant? Are you not happy?"

"Oh yes, I am happy when I have not a doubt left. Antoinette, doubt in
love is a kind of death, is it not?"

In a moment he showed himself as he was, as all men are under the
influence of that hot fever; he grew eloquent, insinuating. And the
Duchess tasted the pleasures which she reconciled with her conscience
by some private, Jesuitical ukase of her own; Armand's love gave her a
thrill of cerebral excitement which custom made as necessary to her as
society, or the Opera. To feel that she was adored by this man, who rose
above other men, whose character frightened her; to treat him like a
child; to play with him as Poppaea played with Nero--many women, like
the wives of King Henry VIII, have paid for such a perilous delight with
all the blood in their veins. Grim presentiment! Even as she surrendered
the delicate, pale, gold curls to his touch, and felt the close pressure
of his hand, the little hand of a man whose greatness she could not
mistake; even as she herself played with his dark, thick locks, in that
boudoir where she reigned a queen, the Duchess would say to herself:

"This man is capable of killing me if he once finds ou