And Burke thrashed Kieff, thrashed him with all the weight of his manhood’s strength, forced him staggering up and down the open space that had been cleared for that awful reckoning, making a public show of him, displaying him to every man present as a crawling, contemptible thing that not one of them would have owned as friend.  It was a ghastly chastisement, made deadly by the hatred that backed it.  Kieff writhed this way and that, but he never escaped the swinging blows.  They followed him mercilessly,—­all the more mercilessly for his struggles.  His coat tore out at the seams and was ripped to rags.  And still Burke thrashed him, his face grim and terrible and his eyes shot red and gleaming—­as the eyes of a murderer.

In the end Kieff stumbled and pitched forward upon his knees, his arms sprawling helplessly out before him.  It was characteristic of the man that he had not uttered a sound; only as Burke stayed his hand his breathing came with a whistling noise through the tense silence, as of a wounded animal brought to earth.  His face was grey.

Burke held him so for a few seconds, then deliberately dropped the horse-whip and grasped him with both hands, lifting him.  Kieff’s head was sunk forward.  He looked as if he would faint.  But inexorably Burke dragged him to his feet and turned him till he stood before Sylvia.

She was leaning against Kelly with her hands over her face.  Relentlessly Burke’s voice broke the silence.

“Now,” he said briefly, “you will apologize to my wife for insulting her.”

She uncovered her face and raised it.  There was shrinking horror in her look.  “Oh, Burke!” she said.  “Let him go!”

“You will—­apologize,” Burke said again very insistently, with pitiless distinctness.

There was a dreadful pause.  Kieff’s breathing was less laboured, but it was painfully uneven and broken.  His lips twitched convulsively.  They seemed to be trying to form words, but no words came.

Burke waited, and several seconds dragged away.  Then suddenly from the door of the office the girl who had received Sylvia the previous evening emerged.

She carried a glass.  “Here you are!” she said curtly.  “Give him this!”

There was neither pity nor horror in her look.  Her eyes dwelt upon Burke with undisguised admiration.

“You’ve given him a good dose this time,” she remarked.  “Serve him right—­the dirty hound!  Hope it’ll be a lesson to the rest of ’em,” and she shot a glance at Piet Vreiboom which was more eloquent than words.

She held the glass to Kieff’s lips with a contemptuous air, and when he had drunk she emptied the dregs upon the floor and marched back into the office.

“Now,” Burke said again, “you will apologize.”

And so at last in a voice so low as to be barely audible, Saul Kieff, from whose sneer all women shrank as from the sting of a scorpion, made unreserved apology to the girl he had plotted to ruin.  At Burke’s behest he withdrew the vile calumny he had launched against her, and he expressed his formal regret for the malice that had prompted it.