“Unbeliever!  Look at this bruise.”

I looked at it, then at her steadily.

“Suzee, did your husband make that bruise?”

“Yes.  He pinched me so hard in a rage with me,” she said a little sulkily.

“Give me your arm,” I said.

She held it out reluctantly.  I looked at the bruise, then I rolled the sleeve back a little farther, and in it found a heavy gold bangle with a boss on one side corresponding with the size of the mark on the flesh.

“I think it is the gold bracelet your kind old husband gave you that you have pressed into the flesh,” I said, “that has marked it.  That is about what his cruelty to you amounts to.”  I dropped her arm contemptuously, and rose suddenly.

She had succeeded in dispelling for the moment the charm of her beauty.  Her prudery, her deceit, her lies made up to me a peculiarly obnoxious mixture.

She sprang up, too, as I rose and threw herself on her knees, clasping her arms round mine so that I could not move.

“Oh Treevor, I do love you so much.  You are my real master, not he.  A woman loves a man who conquers her, but not by buying her.  But because he is better and stronger than she.  Because he has great muscles, as you have, and could kill her, and because she can’t deceive him, because he sees all her lies, as you do.  Yes, Treevor, I love you now very much indeed.  Come here again, kiss me again.”

But somehow her pleading did not move me.  The moment when I had been drawn to her had gone by, swallowed up in a feeling of disgust.

I stooped down and unlocked her hands and put her back among her cushions.

“Good-bye, Suzee, for to-day,” I said.  “To-morrow I will come and take you for a walk.  You must let me go now.  I do not want to stay any longer.”

She looked at me in silence, but did not offer to move from where I had put her.

I gathered up my portfolio and left the room, went down the stairs and through the passage and courtyard to the sun-filled street.

I went on slowly, and after a time found myself close to the church again.  I went in, for the interior interested me, and found service was being held.  A Russian priest, wholly in white clothing, stood before the altar, the cross light from the aisle windows falling on the long twist of fair hair that lay upon his shoulders.  The whole air was full of incense that rose in white clouds to the domed roof.  I sat down near the door and listened while the priest intoned a Latin hymn.  The figure of the young priest at the altar attracted me.  I thought I should like a sketch of it; but I hesitated to take one of him in the church, even surreptitiously, so I fixed the picture of him as he stood there on my eyes as far as I could, and then, in a convenient pause of the service, quietly slipped outside.

Near the church was a great outcrop of rock surmounted by a weather-beaten tree.  In the shade thrown by these I got out a sheet of loose paper and made a sketch of the fair, long-haired priest, with the quaint frame building of the church, its green copper dome and bell tower and double gold crosses behind him.