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"Foolishness, Orual," she answered, shaking her head. "He is a god. He has good grounds for what he does, be sure. How should I know of them? I am only his simple Psyche."

"Then you will not do it? You think — you say you think — that you can prove him a god and set me free from the fears that sicken my heart. But you will not do it."

"I would if I could, Orual."

I looked about me. The sun was almost setting behind the saddle. In a little while she would send me away. I rose up.

"An end of this must be made," I said. "You shall do it. Psyche, I command you."

"Dear Maia, my duty is no longer to you."

"Then my life shall end with it," said I. I flung back my cloak further, thrust out my bare left arm, and struck the dagger into it till the point pricked out on the other side. Pulling the iron back through the wound was the worse pain; but I can hardly believe now how little I felt it.

"Orual! Are you mad?" cried Psyche, leaping up.

"You'll find linen in that urn. Tie up my wound," said I, sitting down and holding my arm out to let the blood fall on the heather.

I had thought she might scream and wring her hands or faint. But I was deceived. She was pale enough but had all her wits about her. She bound my arm. The blood came seeping through fold after fold, but she staunched it in the end. (My stroke had been lucky enough. If I had known as much then as I do now about the inside of an arm, I might not — who knows? — have had the resolution to do it.)

The bandaging could not be done in a moment. The sun was lower and the air colder when we were able to talk again.

"Maia," said Psyche, "what did you do that for?"

"To show you I'm in earnest, girl. Listen. You have driven me to desperate courses. I give you your choice. Swear on this edge, with my blood still wet on it, that you will this very night do as I have commanded you; or else I'll first kill you and then myself."

"Orual," said she, very queenlike, raising her head, "you might have spared that threat of killing me. All your power over me lies in the other."

"Then swear, girl. You never knew me break my word."

The look in her face now was one I did not understand. I think a lover — I mean, a man who loved — might look so on a woman who had been false to him. And at last she said,

"You are indeed teaching me about kinds of love I did not know. It is like looking into a deep pit. I am not sure whether I like your kind better than hatred. Oh, Orual — to take my love for you, because you know it goes down to my very roots and cannot be diminished by any other newer love, and then to make of it a tool, a weapon, a thing of policy and mastery, an instrument of torture — I begin to think I never knew you. Whatever comes after, something that was between us dies here."

"Enough of your subtleties," said I. "Both of us die here, in plainest truth and blood, unless you swear."

"If I do," said she hotly, "it will not be for any doubt of my husband or his love. It will only be because I think better of him than of you. He cannot be cruel like you. I'll not believe it. He will know how I was tortured into my disobedience. He will forgive me."

"He need never know," said I.

The look of scorn she gave me flayed my soul. And yet, this very nobleness in her — had I not taught it to her? What was there in her that was not my work? And now she used it to look at me as if I were base beneath all baseness.

"You thought I would hide it? Thought I would not tell him?" she said, each word like the rubbing of a file across raw flesh. "Well. It's all of a piece. Let us, as you say, make an end. You grow more and more a stranger to me at each word. And I had loved you so — loved, honoured, trusted, and (while it was fit) obeyed. And now — but I can't have your blood on my threshold. You chose your threat well. I'll swear. Where's your dagger?"

So I had won my victory and my heart was in torment. I had a terrible longing to unsay all my words and beg her forgiveness. But I held out the dagger. (The "oath on edge," as we call it, is our strongest