But when the Queen sent for the Captain of the Archers, she detained him four days in her chamber, calling often for food and wine, and was greatly content with him.  On the fourth day she went to the Captive outside her door and said:  “Tomorrow take this man up by the sure way, by which the King comes, and let him live.”

In the Queen’s door were arrows, purple and white.  When she desired the King to come to her publicly, with his guard, she sent him a white arrow; but when she sent the purple, he came secretly, and covered himself with his mantle to be hidden from the stone gods at the gate.  On the fifth night that the Queen was with her lover, the Captive took a purple arrow to the King, and the King came secretly and found them together.  He killed the Captain with his own hand, but the Queen he brought to public trial.  The Captive, when he was put to the question, told on his fingers forty men that he had let through the underground passage into the river.  The Captive and the Queen were put to death by fire, both on the same day, and afterward there was scarcity of rain.

* * * * *

Eden Bower sat shivering a little as she listened.  Hedger was not trying to please her, she thought, but to antagonize and frighten her by his brutal story.  She had often told herself that his lean, big-boned lower jaw was like his bull-dog’s, but tonight his face made Caesar’s most savage and determined expression seem an affectation.  Now she was looking at the man he really was.  Nobody’s eyes had ever defied her like this.  They were searching her and seeing everything; all she had concealed from Livingston, and from the millionaire and his friends, and from the newspaper men.  He was testing her, trying her out, and she was more ill at ease than she wished to show.

“That’s quite a thrilling story,” she said at last, rising and winding her scarf about her throat.  “It must be getting late.  Almost every one has gone.”

They walked down the Avenue like people who have quarrelled, or who wish to get rid of each other.  Hedger did not take her arm at the street crossings, and they did not linger in the Square.  At her door he tried none of the old devices of the Livingston boys.  He stood like a post, having forgotten to take off his hat, gave her a harsh, threatening glance, muttered “goodnight,” and shut his own door noisily.

There was no question of sleep for Eden Bower.  Her brain was working like a machine that would never stop.  After she undressed, she tried to calm her nerves by smoking a cigarette, lying on the divan by the open window.  But she grew wider and wider awake, combating the challenge that had flamed all evening in Hedger’s eyes.  The balloon had been one kind of excitement, the wine another; but the thing that had roused her, as a blow rouses a proud man, was the doubt, the contempt, the sneering hostility with which the painter had looked at her when he told his savage story.  Crowds and balloons were all very well, she reflected, but woman’s chief adventure is man.  With a mind over active and a sense of life over strong, she wanted to walk across the roofs in the starlight, to sail over the sea and face at once a world of which she had never been afraid.