Her colour beat quickly back, warming her eyes.

“Oh, I am so glad,” she said.  “When you know all you will do as we ask you, because it is right and just.  If he did not serve that two years’ sentence he has served six years of poverty and sickness.  He is a wreck—­we should not know him, they say—­and he has not seen his wife and children for—­”

He raised his hand and stopped her.  A rising anger clouded his face, and, as she met his eyes, she slowly whitened.

“And you ask me—­me of all men—­to show mercy to Bernard Battle?  Was there not a governor of Virginia before me?”

She shook her head.

“Oh, it was different then—­he did not know, and we did not know, everything.  For years we had not heard from him—­”

“So my predecessor refused?” he asked.

She bowed her head.  “But it is so different now—­every one is with us.”

He was looking her over grimly in an anger that seemed an emotional reversion to the past—­as he felt himself reverting with all his strength to the original savage of the race.  The hour for which he had starved sixteen years ago was unfolding for him at last.  He gloated over it with a passion that would sicken him when it was done.

“When you came to me,” he said slowly, “did you remember—­”

She had risen and was standing before him, her hands hidden in the fur upon her bosom.  She was pleading now with startled eyes and cold lips—­she who had turned from him when the first lie was spoken—­she was pleading for the man who had blackened his friend’s honour that he might shield his own—­she was pleading though she knew his baseness.  The very nobility of her posture—­the nobility that he had found outwardly in no other woman—­hardened the man before her.  The cold brow, the fervent mouth, the fearless eyes, the lines with which Time had chastened into womanliness her girlish figure—­these had become the expression of an invincible regret.  As he faced her the iron of his nature held him as in a vise, for life, which had made him a just man, had not made him a gentle one.

But her spirit had risen to match with his.  “He wronged you once,” she said; “let it pass—­we have all been young and very ignorant; but we do not make our lives, thank God.”

He looked at her in silence.

Then, as he stood there, the walls of the room passed from before his eyes, and the gray light from the western window was falling upon the white road beyond the cedars.  The vague pasture swept to the far-off horizon where hung the solitary star above the sunset.  From the west a light wind blew, and into their faces dead leaves whirled from denuded trees far distant.  But surest of all was this—­he hated now as he hated then.  “As for him—­may God, in His mercy, damn him,” he had said.

“Because he wronged you do not wrong yourself,” she spoke fearlessly, but she fell back with an upward movement of her hands.  The man was before her as the memory had been for years—­she knew the distorted features, the convulsed, closed mouth, the furrow that cleft the forehead like a scar.  She saw the savage as she had seen it once before, and she braved it now as she had braved it then.