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.

Seven years ago, when Michael Kalmar had condescended to make her his
wife, her whole soul had gone forth to him in a passion of adoring love
that had invested him in a halo of glory. He became her god thenceforth
to worship and to serve. Her infidelity meant no diminution of this
passion. Withdrawn from her husband's influence, left without any sign
of his existence for two years or more, subjected to the machinations
of the subtle and unscrupulous Rosenblatt, the soul in her had died,
the animal had lived and triumphed. The sound