And at the mere mention of the criminal, a shudder would run throughout Antonia's body.
After all, twenty years contain a good many days, and time alleviates even the cruelest pain. Sometimes it seemed to Antonia as though all that had happened was a dream, or that the wide gates of the prison, having once closed upon the condemned man, would never again reopen; and that the law, which in the end had punishment for the first crime, would have the power to prevent a second. The law! that moral entity, of which Antonia formed a mysterious and confused conception, was beyond doubt a terrible force, yet one that offered protection; a hand of iron that would sustain her upon the brink of an abyss. Accordingly she added to her illimitable fears a sort of indefinable confidence, founded chiefly upon the time that had already elapsed and that which remained before the expiration of the sentence.
Strange, indeed, is the conception of human events! Certainly it would never have occurred to the king, when, clad in the uniform of general-in-chief and with his breast covered over with decorations, he gave his hand to a princess before the altar, that this solemn act would cost pangs beyond number to a poor washerwoman in the capital of a distant province. When Antonia learned that her husband had been one of the convicts singled out for royal clemency, she spoke not a word; and the neighbors found her seated on the sill of her doorway, with her fingers interlocked and her head drooping forward on her breast; while the boy, raising his sad face, with its stamp of chronic invalidism, kept moaning:
