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him on.”
    Rannulf nodded, and she turned her back for a moment and stood quite still. Then he watched her hands ball slowly into fists and she turned on him. He almost got up from his chair and retreated behind it. The green eyes pierced him with cold scorn.
    “‘Was the hope drunk / Wherein you dress’d yourself?’ ” she asked him quietly. “‘Hath it slept since, / And wakes it now, to look so green and pale / At what it did so freely?’ ”
    Rannulf resisted the urge to speak up in his own defense.
    “‘From this time / Such I account thy love,’ ” she told him.
    She spoke his lines too, leaning over him to do so and speaking in a low voice, giving him the impression that he was saying the words himself without moving his lips. As Lady Macbeth she whipped into him with her energy and contempt and wily persuasions. By the time she had finished, Rannulf could fully understand at last why Macbeth had committed such an asinine deed as murdering his king.
    She was panting by the time she came to the end of her persuasions, looking cold and triumphant and slightly mad.
    Rannulf found himself near to panting with desire. As her identification with the role she had played faded from her eyes and her body, they stared at each other, and the air between them fairly sizzled.
    “Well,” he said softly.
    She half smiled. “You must understand,” she said, “that I am somewhat rusty. I have not acted for three months and am out of practice.”
    “Heaven help us,” he said, getting to his feet, “if you were
in
practice. I might be dashing off into the rain to find the nearest available king to assassinate.”
    “So what do you think?” she asked him.
    “I think,” he said, “that it is time for bed.”
    For a moment he thought she was going to refuse. She stared at him, licked her lips, drew breath as if to say something, then nodded.
    “Yes,” she said.
    He bent his head and kissed her. He was quite ready to tumble her to the floor and take her there and then, but why put them to that discomfort when there was a perfectly comfortable-looking bed in the next room? Besides, there were certain bodily realities to consider.
    “Go and get ready,” he said. “I’ll wander downstairs for ten minutes.”
    Again she hesitated and licked her lips.
    “Yes,” she said and turned away. A moment later the bedchamber door closed behind her.
    The next ten minutes, Rannulf thought, were going to feel like an uncomfortable eternity.
    Devil take it, but she could act.

CHAPTER III

    J udith stood with her back against the bedchamber door after she had shut it, and closed her eyes. Her head was spinning, her heart was thumping, and she was breathless. There were so many reasons for all three conditions that she could not possibly sort through them all to regain her customary composure.
    Primarily, she had drunk too much wine. Four glasses in all. She had never before drunk more than half a glass in one day, and even that had happened only three or four times in her life. She was not drunk—she could think quite coherently and walk a straight line. But even so, she
had
consumed all that wine.
    Then there had been the intoxicating excitement of acting before an audience—even if it
had
been an audience of only one. Acting had always been a part of her very secret life, something she did when she was quite, quite sure she was alone and unobserved. She had never really thought of it as
acting,
though, but as the bringing alive of another human being through the words the dramatist had provided. She had always had the ability to think her way into another person’s body and mind and know just what it felt like to be that person under those circumstances. Sometimes she had tried to use that ability to write stories, but it was not in the written word that her talent lay. She needed to create or re-create characters with her very body and voice. When she acted the part of Portia or Lady Macbeth, she
became
them.
    But