"Hush!"
"Mamma—"
All was silent again.
Sometimes the sight of profound misery, which ought to stir compassion, arouses, instead, a furious contempt. This was the effect produced upon the young man by what he saw. On one side fire was devouring the cottages of peaceful peasants; men were buried alive in their fiery graves, and those who escaped the fire fell under the sword of the barbarian; on the other side he heard the agonized whisperings of a bleeding father and a tired, breathless mother,—he heard the suppressed sobs and cries of their child,—he saw the desperate flight of a family thus made wretched, yet his contemptuously curved lips seemed to say: "You deserve your fate! When the lamb is obliged to live with the wolf, he must try to develop teeth like the wolf's, if he does not wish to be devoured."
Circumstances had placed him in a position where he himself had been compelled, against his will, to turn into a wolf. In his early childhood his family had disowned him. He was banished from the paternal roof as a prodigal son. He was not admitted into the communities of his own nationality; everybody shunned him as they would have shunned the devil or the plague. He was left to surrender himself to the current of circumstances, and became a wandering adventurer.
But he had never lost the dignity of a lion who scorns to attack weak or disabled animals, and leaves the largest part of his game to feed the smaller beasts.
After ten years' wanderings this hapless exile had returned to his native soil when he heard that danger threatened. He had not come to save his country, for he knew that many men like himself could not save it, since it had not the ability to save itself. He had come to save a beautiful and delicate creature, the only being whom he loved, and the only being in the world who loved the man that all others hated.
This was the secret of his pressing onward without rest. But Nature always claims her dues. He had now traveled
