"A child is a gift which God has given the father," said he; "it were better for him to lose himself than lose God's gift; and now we, who are of the few who have not mixed with that devil-brood—we are fallen even as others. You have brought disgrace on me, and on our dead, and on our living, and I would sooner have seen you dead yourself than hear this from your lips!"
"They were six to one," said Andréa, "and they left me for dead. Would to God they had killed me!"
"Would to God they had killed you," said his father, "and her too."
"The fault was not mine. Will you not forgive me?"
"Yes, when the fault is wiped out by the death of Theodora."
"Of Theodora? What has she done?"
"She will grow up in shame, and mate with devils. Go!"
Five years passed before they met again. But one day Andréa's father, left lonely in his house, moved by some vague desire which he hardly understood himself, saddled his mule and went to Nauplia, whither Andréa had gone. He was very old and very feeble in body, and perhaps he felt that death could not be far from him; and to Andréa's cry of welcome and wonder—"I have come to you, my son," said the old man, "for otherwise we are both alone, and—and I am very old."
Day by day he used to sit looking up and down the road for Theodora. There was a bend in it some quarter of a mile farther up, and sometimes, when the spring days were warm to his bones, he would hobble up to the corner and sit waiting for her there, where he could command a longer stretch of country. But Theodora came not, and one evening, when he came back, he sank into a chair without strength and called Andréa to him.
"I am dying," he said, "and this is no season to waste idle words. When Theodora comes back"—he always clung to the idea that she would come back—"tell her that I waited for her every day, for I should have loved to see her again. And if you find it hard, Andréa, to forgive her, forgive her for my sake, for she was very little and the fault was not hers; nor is it yours, and I was hard on you; yet if I had loved you not, I should have cared the less. But if, when the day comes, you spare your hand and do not take vengeance on the Turks to the uttermost, then may my ghost tear you limb from limb, and give you to the vultures and the jackals."