“Finis, for that!” said he, and smiled strangely.  “You aren’t going to be handicapped by any mask, in whatever struggle lies ahead of us.  If you get through to the world, and to life again, you get through as a woman.

“If not, you die as one.  But the disguise is done with, and gone.  You understand me!”

“Yes.  I understand,” she answered, and stood peering up at him.  Not even the white welts and ridges cut in her flesh by the long wearing of the mask could make her face anything but very beautiful.  Her wonderful eyes mirrored far more, as they looked into this strange man’s, than would be easy to write down in words.

“I understand,” she repeated.  “If this is death, I couldn’t have dreamed or hoped for a better one.  In that, at least, we can be eternally together—­you and I!”

Silence fell, save for the shuddering roar of the black river, that rose with vapors from the dark pit.  Man and woman, they searched out each other’s souls with their gaze.

Then all at once the Master took her hand, and brought it to his heart and held it there.  The lamp-shine, obliquely striking upward from the floor, cast deep shadows over their faces; and these shadows seemed symbolic of the shadows of death closing about them at this hour of self-revelation.

“Listen,” said the Master, in a wholly other voice from any that had ever come from his lips.  “I am going to tell you something.  At a moment like this, a man speaks only the exact truth.  This is the exact truth.

“In all the years of my life and in all my wanderings up and down this world, I have never seen a woman—­till now—­whom I felt that I could love.  I have lived like an anchorite, celled in absolute isolation from womankind.  Incredible as it may seem to you, I have never even kissed a woman, with a kiss of love.  But—­I am going to kiss you, now.”

He took her face in both his hands, drew it up for a moment, gazed at it with a fixity of passion that seemed to burn.  The woman’s eyes drooped shut.  Her lips yearned to his.  Then his stern arms in-drew her to his breast, and for a moment she remained there, silently.

All at once he put her from him.

“Now, go!” he commanded.  “I shall follow, close.  And wait for me—­if there is any waiting!”

He picked up one of the two remaining wine-sacks, and put it into her hands.

“Cling to this, through everything!” he commanded.  “Cling, as you love life.  Cling, as you share my hope for what may be, if life is granted us!  And—­the mercy-bullet, if it comes to that!

“Now—­good-bye!”

She smiled silently and was gone.

The Master, now all alone, stood waiting yet a moment.  His face was bloodless.  His lower lip was mangled, where his teeth had nearly met, through it.

Already, a confused murmur of sound was developing, from the black opening of the passage that had led the Legionaries down to this crypt of the wine-sacks and the pit.