"I would not care much if you did escape!" she exclaimed dully. "He would kill me then, and I think I would be happier if he did. Look there."
She pointed to the child who lay upon a pile of straw on the floor, the miserable little hunchback who had unconsciously prevented Leonie from leaving there upon the night of her imprisonment.
"He has killed him," continued the woman, her voice filing passionately. "Last night when the poor child came in he was sick, so sick that he could scarcely drag his misshapen body after him. Ben told him to do something, and Dick did not get up as quick as Ben thought he ought, and he gave him a terrible beating. This morning the poor boy was so sick that he could not get out of his bed. I begged Ben to let him alone, but the more I begged the more determined he became. Dick got up, and as he did so, staggered against the wall and fell; then Ben, who swore it was nothing but laziness, got the cowhide, and the poor body is black and blue from the marks upon it. Oh, if God would but strike him dead, how much good it would do us all!"
"Why do you live with him, Liz? Why do you not run away?"
"Why?" she asked bitterly. "Where would I go? What would I do? Besides, he would find me and he would kill me. You don't know Ben as I do. He is not the only man in the world that cares nothing for his wife and yet forces her to live with him, because the devil in his nature tells him that it is a good way to torture her. I don't go because I am afraid, like a thousand other poor women who inhabit the world. Some day I know that I shall kill him. If he would confine his beatings to me, I might endure it, but when he treats Dick in the way that he does, there will come a time when the worm will turn, and I, who have been trampled upon, will become a fiend of his own creating."
Leonie had turned away from the woman's passionate agony, and had lifted the little form that lay upon its rude bed in her arms.
The child groaned and shrunk back as though expecting a blow, and a hot tear fell upon his flushed cheeks as he saw the compassionate face bent above him.
Leonie laid her cool hand upon his burning brow, and in a soothing voice said:
"What pains you, Dick? Tell me, dear, and perhaps there may be something that I can do for you! Don't be afraid. There is nothing to hurt you now."
He lifted his scorching hand and laid it upon her face. His lips trembled so that articulation was almost impossible, but he managed to make her understand the words: