one shrill wail, and snatching her boy up in her arms, started to run to the door. The man intercepted her.
"Come, come! Where are you off to, my lady?" he asked her, with harsh irony. "Rousing the neighborhood at this time of night? Stay home and stop your noise!"
The last words were spoken without any accompanying gesture of intimidation, but in atone that froze Antonia's blood. Her first stupefaction had by this time given place to fever, the lucid fever of the instinct of self-preservation. A sudden thought flashed through her mind: she would appeal to hint through the child. The father had never seen him, but after all he was his father. Catching the boy up, she carried him over to the light.
"Is that the kid?" murmured the convict, and taking up the candle he held it close to the boy's face. The latter, dazzled, blinked his eyes and covered his face with his hands, as if trying to hide from this unknown father whose name he had never heard pronounced excepting with universal fear and condemnation. He shrank back against his mother, and she at the same time nervously held him close, while her face grew whiter than wax.
"What an ugly kid!" muttered the father, setting the candle down again. "He looks as if the witches had sucked him dry."
Antonia, still holding the boy, leaned against the wall, half fainting. The room seemed to be circling around her, and the air was full of tiny flecks of blue light.
"Look here, isn't there anything to eat in
