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Underneath was a small heap of oil-soaked rags. "You remember what we saw at the House of Power?" said Nanna, significantly. Esmay examined the wire carefully. At the broken end the insulating fabric had been stripped off and the copper scraped clean and bright with a knife-blade.
"Esmay!" he called, but she would not stop, gathering up her skirts in both her hands, and trying not to look behind her. But he was quickly at her heels, and an inexplicable terror seemed to seize her; she looked about for a hiding-place; a door presented itself, and she clutched the handle desperately, but it refused to turn.
Old Kurt and a couple of negro slave women made up the ordinary domestic staff of the establishment, and until the advent of Esmay and Nanna, some three months before, Arcadia House had received no visitors. And he would be a foolish man who called upon Quinton Edge without an invitation. Esmay, after parting from Constans, paused a moment at the side entrance of the house.
And so, through the night, he dreamed and drifted. It was a week later that Esmay looked into Nanna's face bending over her, and knew that remembrance had come again.
"I am to be informed of my purchaser's name after the bargaining is over? And only then?" "Since you choose to put it in that way yes." Neither chose to break the silence that fell between them, and Esmay, catching up her skirt, turned to go. "Good-night," she said, but Quinton Edge did not answer.
Esmay always listened attentively, and it pleased her to think that Constans looked at her when he talked, even though his actual words might be addressed to Piers Minor or to Nanna. Listening always, but speaking seldom, for she felt that he was waiting purposely until some milestone of achievement had been passed, and she feared that he might consider her unwomanly.
"Starving," said Nanna, briefly, and proceeded to force a few drops of wine from a pocket-flask between his lips, while Esmay ran for the basket of food which had been brought along as an offertory in their assumed character of worshippers. The stimulant acted powerfully, and within the hour Prosper was so far restored as to be able to partake of some solid food.
"Frankly, then, I don't want to carry the weight of the wolf-skin; I should feel like a man buried up to his neck in sand. I dreamed of that the other night, and how a raven that had Quinton Edge's face came and pecked at my eyes." "Then you really don't care," commented Constans, shrewdly. "No; except to have my fair share of the fighting and feasting and, of course, Esmay." Constans laughed.
"A woman, and some day he would come to know what that meant." Now he knew. Esmay stood waiting for the answer to her question. "You cannot go alone," he said, in a half-whisper, "and your sister's protection is useless. You will have to trust yourself to me."
Esmay, startled, clung to her husband's arm. "What is it?" she asked, but he could not answer her. Yet as they gazed upon the new star, insensibly they became comforted. Whatever this prodigy foretold, it could not be an omen of lasting evil. Had they not seen for themselves that, even in the worst of worlds, righteousness and justice and truth had been something more than names.
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