"But you must have a home? You live—where?"
"At the mill with Flamma."
"Does he also ill use you?"
"He beats me."
"When you do wrong?"
She was silent.
"Wrong?" "Right?"
They were but words to her—empty and meaningless. She knew that he beat her more often because she told truth or refused to cheat. For aught that she was sure of, she might be wrong, and he right.
Arslàn looked at her musingly. All the thought he had was to induce her to return to the attitude necessary to the completion of his picture.
He put a few more questions to her; but the replies told him little. At all times silent, before him a thousand emotions held her dumb. She was afraid, besides, that at every word he might suspect the debt he owed to her, and she dreaded its avowal with as passionate a fear as though, in lieu of the highest sacrifice and service, her action had been some crime against him. She felt ashamed of it, as of some unholy thing: it seemed to her impious to have dared to give him back a life that he had wearied of, and might have wished to lose.