Page:Storm Over Paris.pdf/323

blue of his eyes until his passion was stabbed into life again.

"Anna!"-he drew her slowly into his arms, seeking the path to ecstasy, and ran headlong into the roadblock of their age that no lovers' passion could demolish. Anna's hands fluttered to her sides like wounded birds, and Eric fell back, his eyes widened by the dread imprisoned within them.

"You're selling yourself to the Devil!" He could hear Fritz's voice, loud and spectral, echoing in his brain, like a lament in an empty tomb. "You're selling yourself to the Devil, to the Jewess, selling eternity for a miserable moment! Remember your duty to yourself and to Germany! Use her only as a decoy, a shield. Ours is the final victory!"

• * *

"Ours is the final victory," Anna was thinking as if the words had flamed into her brain, as one torch is lit by another.

But a demoniac skepticism gripped her soul. "Isn't the conqueror as much a victim as the conquered?" she thought. A deep voice within her-the voice of her slaughtered people -took up the challenge. "No, not if fate is with you. You must be the weapon of our revenge. Don't use your own judgment. You belong to your generation-you are bound to the dead-pledged to the living, consecrated to the bright future!"

Anna struggled with her thoughts. Her fingers ran nervously through her hair-over her face-crept into the pockets of her raincoat and closed on the cold iron of the revolver.

"Do you remember, Anna," the voice went on, "how you grabbed it from the dead boy's hands? It was on the Place de la Republique-do you remember his stare? 'I died and you are alive!' his eyes seemed to say. And do you know