He drew away from her and sat down upon a bench.

“Listen,” he said.  “I will send you money.  You will require to take no man into your house for your support.  Is there any one to whom I could send the money for you?”

She thought for a few moments.

“There is one,” she said, “but she does not love me.  She will come no longer into my house.  She thinks me a bad woman.”  Her voice sank low.  Her face flamed a dark red.

“Aha,” said the man, “I would see that woman.  To-morrow you will bring me to her.  At dusk to-morrow I will pass your house.  You will meet me.  Now go.”

She remained kneeling in her place.  Then she crawled nearer his feet.

“Oh, my lord!” she sobbed, “I have done wrong.  Will you not beat me?  Beat me till the blood runs down.  He was too strong for me.  I was afraid for the children.  I had no place to go.  I did a great wrong.  If my lord would but beat me till the blood runs down, it would be a joy to me.”

It was the cry of justice making itself heard through her dull soul.  It was the instinctive demand for atonement.  It was the unconscious appeal for reinstatement to the privileges of wifehood.

“Woman,” he said sternly, “a man may beat his wife.  He will not strike a woman that is nothing to him.  Go.”

Once more she clutched his feet, kissing them.  Then she rose and without a word went out into the dusky night.  She had entered upon the rugged path of penitence, the only path to peace for the sinner.

After she had gone, the man stepped to the door and looked after her as if meditating her recall.

“Bah!” he said at length, “she is nothing to me.  Let her go.”

He put out the light, closed the door and passing through the crowd of revellers, went off to Simon’s house.

CHAPTER V

THE PATRIOT’S HEART

The inside of Paulina’s house was a wreck.  The remains of benches and chairs and tables mingled with fragments of vessels of different sorts strewn upon the filth-littered floor, the windows broken, the door between the outer and inner rooms torn from its hinges, all this debris, together with the battered, bruised and bloody human shapes lying amidst their filth, gave eloquent testimony to the tempestuous character of the proceedings of the previous night.

The scene that greeted Paulina’s eyes in the early grey of the morning might well have struck a stouter heart than hers with dismay; for her house had the look of having been swept by a tornado, and Paulina’s heart was anything but stout that morning.  The sudden appearance of her husband had at first stricken her with horrible fear, the fear of death; but this fear had passed into a more dreadful horror, that of repudiation.