"Your spies have misinformed you! But I am in no mood to constitute the target of your jests!"
"There is but one will which rules these halls," Theodora flashed out. "If obedience to its mandates is distasteful to you, the gates are open—spread your pinions and fly away!"
She flung back her head and their eyes met.
Benilo turned away, uttering a terrible curse between his clenched teeth.
There was a deep hush in the hall, as if the spirit of the dead girl was haunting the guests. The harps played a plaintive melody, which might indeed have stolen from some hearth of ashes, when stirred by the breath of its smouldering spark, like phantom-memories from another world, that seemed to call to Theodora’s inner consciousness, each note a foot-step, leading her away beyond the glint and glitter of the world that surrounded her, to a garden of purity and peace in the dim, long-forgotten past. Theodora sat in a reverie, her strange eyes fixed on nothingness, her red lips parted, disclosing two rows of teeth, small, even, pearly, while her full, white bosom rose and fell with quickened respiration.
"The Queen of the Groves is in a pensive mood to-night," sneered the Lord of Bracciano, who had been engaged in mentally weighing her charms against those of Roxané.
"I may well be pensive, for I have seen to-day, what I had despaired of ever again beholding in Rome—can you guess what it is?"
Shouts of laughter broke, a jarring discord, harshly upon her speech.
"We are perishing with curiosity," shouted, as with one voice, the debauched nobles and their feminine companions.
"In the name of pity, save our lives!" begged a girl nearest to Theodora’s seat.
"Can you guess?" the Queen of the Groves repeated simply, as she gazed round the assembly.
All sorts of strange answers were hurled at the throne of the Queen of the Groves. She heeded them not. Perhaps she did not even hear them.
Without commenting on the guesses of her guests, she said:
Benilo squirmed. The rest of the guests laughed harshly and Bembo, the Poet asked with a vapid grin:
"And is the sight so wondrous that the Queen of Love sits dreaming among her admirers like a Sphinx in the African desert?"
"Had he horns?" shouted the Lord of Bracciano.