If he expected her to wince under the probe, her nerves were taut, and she defied the steel; but the face she now turned fully to him was so blanched by illness, so hopeless in its rigid calm, that he felt a keen pain at his own heart.

“Prisoners, victims of justice, have, it seems, no privileges; else my one request, my earnest prayer to be shielded from your presence, might have protected me from this intrusion.  Are you akin to Parrhasius that you come to gloat over the agonies of a moral and mental vivisection?  The sight of suffering to which you have brought a helpless woman, is scarcely the recompense I was taught to suppose agreeable to a chivalrous Southern gentleman.  If, wearing the red livery of Justice, undue zeal for vengeance betrayed you into the fatal mistake of trampling me into this horrible place, there might be palliation; but for the brutal persistency with which you thrust your tormenting presence upon me, not even heavenly charity could possibly find pardon.  Literally you are heaping insult upon awful injury.  Is it a refinement of cruelty that brings you here to watch and analyze my suffering, as a biologist looks through lenses at an insect he empales, or Pasteur scrutinizes the mortal throes of the victims into whose veins he has injected poison?”

If she had drawn a lash across his face, it would not have stung more keenly than her words, so expressive of detestation.

“Will you consider for a moment the possibility that other motives actuate me; that ceaseless regret, remorse, if you choose, for a terrible mistake, impels me to come here in the hope of making reparation?”

“Such a supposition is as inconceivable as the idea of reparation.  When a reaper goes forth to his ripe harvest, his lawful labor, and wantonly turns aside into a by-path, to try the edge of his sickle on an humble, unoffending stalk that fights for life among the grass and weeds, and struggles to get its head sufficiently in the sunshine to bloom—­when he cuts it off unopened, crushes it into the sod, can he make reparation?  Although it is neither bearded yellow wheat, nor yet a black tare, it proved the temper of his blade; and all the skill, all the science of universal humanity, cannot re-erect the stem, cannot remove the stains, cannot unfold the bruised petals.  There are wrongs that all time will never repair.  Your sword of justice needs no whetting; one stroke has laid me low.”

“I purpose to file it two-edged, in order to make no more mistakes.  Before long I shall cut down the real criminal, the principal, who shall not escape, and for whom you shall not suffer.”

“Then ‘a life for a life’ no longer satisfies?  How many are required?  The law has need of a sacrificial stone wide as that of the Aztecs.  Is justice a’daughter of the horse-leech’?”

“So help me God—­”