'How comes it that Bessas knows every word that has passed between
us?' broke fiercely from her lips.
In an instant Marcian commanded himself, shrugged his shoulders, and
laughed.
'That is a question,' he said, 'to put to your astrologer, your
oneirocritic, your genethliac. I profess not to read mysteries.'
'Liar!' she shot out. 'How could he have had it but from your own
lips?'
Marcian betook himself to his utmost dissimulation, and the talk of
the next few minutes--on his part, deliberately provocative; on
hers, recklessly vehement--instructed him in much that he had
desired to learn. It was made clear to him that a long combat of
wills and desires had been in progress between the crafty courtesan
and the half wily and the half brutal soldier, with a baffling of
Heliodora's devices which would never have come to his knowledge but
for this outbreak of rage. How far the woman had gone in her lures,
whether she had played her last stake, he could not even now
determine; but he suspected that only such supreme defeat could
account for the fury in which he beheld her.
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