beauty
that flitted about them, ministering to their voracity.

To none more than to Rosenblatt himself was the transformation of
Irma a surprise and a mystery. It made him uneasy. He had an
instinctive feeling that this was the beginning of an emancipation
that would leave him one day without his slaves. Paulina, too,
would learn the new ways; then she and the girl, who now spent long
hours of hard labour in his service, would demand money for their
toil. The thought grieved him sore. But there was another thought
that stabbed him with a keener pain. Paulina and her family would
learn that they need no longer fear him, that they could do without
him, and then they would escape from his control. And this
Rosenblatt dreaded above all things else. To lose the power to
keep in degradation the wife and children of the man he hated with
a quenchless hatred would be to lose much of the sweetness of life.
Those few terrible moments when he had lain waiting for the
uplifted knife of his foe to penetrate his shrinking eyeballs had
taken years from him. He had come back to his life older, weaker,
broken in nerve and more than ever consumed with a thirst for
vengeance. Since Kalmar's escape he lived in daily, hourly fear
that his enemy would strike again and this time without missing,
and with feverish anxiety he planned to anticipate that hour with
a vengeance which would rob death of much of its sting.

So far he had succeeded only partially. Paulina and Irma he held in
domestic bondage. From the boy Kalman, too, he exacted day by day the
full tale of his scanty profits made from selling newspapers on the
street. But beyond this he could not go. By no sort of terror could he
induce Paulina to return to the old conditions and rent floor space
in her room to his boarders. At her door she stood on guard, refusing
admittance. Once, indeed, when hard pressed by Rosenblatt demanding
entrance, she had thrown herself before him with a butcher knife in
her hand, and with a look of such transforming fierceness on her face
as drove him from the house in fear of his life. She was no longer his
patient drudge, but a woman defending, not so much her own, as her
husband's honour, a tigress guarding her young.

Never again did Rosenblatt attempt to pass through that door, but
schooled himself to wait a better time and a safer path to compass
his vengeance. But from that moment, where there had been merely
contempt for Paulina and her family