The beautiful child trembled, for the words were those of hatred and triumph.  She trembled, but she also wept.  She was parting from those whose lives were base and cruel; but they were the only human beings that she knew.  She was leaving a wagon and a tent, but it was the only home that she could remember.  In a vague and childish way, she felt herself to be the sport of mysterious powers, a little shuttlecock between the battledores of Fortune.  Whatever her destiny was to be, there was no use in struggling, and so she sobbed softly and yielded to the inevitable.  Her little hands were folded across her heart in an instinctive attitude of submission.  Folded hands are not always resigned hands; but Pepeeta’s were.  She submitted thus quietly not because she was weak, but because she was strong, not because she was contemptible, but because she was noble.  In proportion to the majesty of things, is the completeness of their obedience to the powers that are above them.  Gravitation is obeyed less quietly by a grain of dust than by the rivers and planets.  Those half-suppressed sobs and hardly restrained sighs would have softened a harder heart than that of this young man of thirty years.  He was rude and unscrupulous, but he was not unkind.  His breast was the abiding place of all other passions and it was not strange that the gentlest of all should reside within it, nor that it should have been so quickly aroused at the sight of such loveliness and such helplessness.

To have a fellow-being completely in our power makes us either utterly cruel or utterly kind, and all that was gentle in that great rough nature went out in a rush of tenderness toward the little creature who thus suddenly became absolutely dependent upon his compassion.  After they had ridden a little way, he began in his rough fashion to try to comfort her.

“Don’t cry, Pepeeta!  You ought to be thankful that you have got out of the clutches of those villains.  You could not have been worse off, and you may be a great deal better!  They were not always kind to you, were they?  I shouldn’t wonder if they beat you sometimes!  But you will never be beaten any more.  You shall have a nice little pony, and a cart, and flowers, and pretty clothes, and everything that little girls like.  I don’t know what they are, but whatever they are you shall have them.  So don’t cry any more!  What a pretty name Pepeeta is!  It sounds like music when I say it.  I have got the toughest name in the world myself.  It’s a regular jaw-breaker—­Doctor Paracelsus Aesculapius!  What do you think of that, Pepeeta!  But then you need not call me by the whole of it!  You can just call me Doctor, for short.  Now, look at me just once, and give me a pretty smile.  Let me see those big black eyes!  No?  You don’t want to?  Well, that’s all right.  I won’t bother you.  But I want you to know that I love you, and that you are never going to have any more trouble as long as you live.”