We returned to Eveena’s chamber.  The scene that followed I cannot bear to recall.  Enough that Eive knew as well as Eveena the law she had broken and the penalty she had incurred; and, petted darling as she had been, she utterly lacked all faith in the tenderness she had known so well, or even in the mercy to which Eveena had confidently appealed.  Understanding at last that she was safe from the law, the expression of her gratitude was as vehement as her terror had been intense.  But the new phase of passion was not the less repugnant.  Not that there was anything strange in the violent revulsion of feeling.  Born and trained among a race who fear to forgive, Eive was familiar by report at least with the merciless vengeance of cowards.  Whatever they might have done later, few would have promised mercy in the very moment of escape to an ordinary assassin; and if Eive understood any aspect of my character, that she could best appreciate was the outraged tenderness which forbade me to look on hers as ordinary guilt.  Acutely sensitive to pain and fear, she had both known the better to what terror might prompt the injured, and was the more appalled by the prospect.  Her eagerness to accept by anticipation whatever degradation and pain domestic power could inflict, when released by the terrible alternative of legal prosecution from its usual limits, breathed more of doubt and terror than of shame or penitence.  But at first it keenly affected me.  It was with something akin to a bodily pang that I heard this fragile girl, so easily subdued by such rebuke or menace as her companions would scarcely have affected to fear, now pleading for punishment such as would have quelled the pride and courage of the most high-spirited of her sex.  I felt the deepest pity, not so much for the fear with which she still trembled as for the agony of terror she must have previously endured.  Eveena averted from her abject supplications a face in which I read much pain, but more of what would have been disgust in a less intensely sympathetic nature.  And ere long I saw or felt in Eive’s manner that which caused me suddenly to dismiss Eveena from the room, as from a presence unfit for her spotless purity and exquisite delicacy.  Finding in me no sign of passionate anger, no readiness, but reluctance to visit treason with physical pain, Eive’s own expression changed.  Unable to conceive the feeling that rendered the course she had at first expected simply impossible to me, a nature I had utterly misconceived caught at an idea few women, not experienced in the worst of life’s lessons, would have entertained.  The tiny fragile form, the slight limbs whose delicate proportions seemed to me almost those of infancy, their irrepressible quivering plainly revealed by the absence of robe and veil, no man worthy of the name could have beheld without intense compassion.  But such a feeling she could not realise.  As her features lost the sincerity of overwhelming fear, as the drooping lids failed for one moment to conceal