boldness--she reads his face with a swift glance that tells
her he is no longer a lad, a pretty boy to be trifled with for
the amusement of an idle hour. The Cupid's bow had
faded forever from his lip and childhood's innocence from
his eye; he has crossed life's Rubicon, has passed at one
stride from the Vale of Youth with its trifles and its idle
tears, its ignorance of sex and stainless love, to Manhood's
rugged mountains, where blazes Ambition's baleful star and
the fires of passion ever beat, fiercer than those that sweep
Gehenna's sulphurous hills.

Even while her cheek crimsons with anger and her heart
flutters with fear, the woman glories in Joseph's guilty
love, sweet incense to her vanity, evidence of her
peerless beauty's infernal power. She retreats a step as
from the brink of an abyss, but farther she cannot fly, for
there is a charm in her companion's voice, potent as old
Merlin's mystic chant--tones low and sweet as music in
dreams by maids who sleep in Dian's bosom, yet wilder,
fiercer than trumpets blown for war. As a sailor drawn to
his doom by siren song, or a bird spellbound by some
noxious serpent, she advances fearfully and slow until she
is swept into his strong arms and held quivering there like a
splotch of foam in a swift eddy of the upper Nile. The room
swims before her eyes and fills with mocking demons
that welcome her to the realm of darkness; the fountains'
ripple sounds like roaring thunder, in which she reads the
angry warning of Egypt's gods, while beneath the accursed
magic of the kisses that burn upon her lips, her blood
becomes boiling wine and rushes hissing through a heart of