"I? How could I guess it! If only you had come to fetch me."
"But I did go to fetch you, but the dark man kicked me away from the door."
"Who?"
"The pale dark man, with black eyes--"
"Correntian!" cried Donatus. "Did you tell him that it was Berntrudis that was ill?"
"Indeed I did, and I entreated him to send you to comfort her at the last. But he threatened to tread me to death like an adder."
"You!" groaned Donatus, and as if it were his part to protect her, he threw his arm round the child's shoulder, and pressed her closely to him. "Correntian!" he repeated, "may God recompense him!"
Porphyrius laid a warning hand on his companion's arm. "Donatus!" he said.
But Donatus heeded not.
"To cast out this child in the night and storm when she had come to ask for the last consolation for a dying woman! Woe to Correntian! That is not the spirit that ought to inspire us," and he held the child clasped to him as a father might. "Poor, forsaken orphan! here, here you have a home, I will make up for what the hard man did to you; I will repay to you, her nursling, all that my faithful nurse did for me, all she suffered for me! Yea! I will, as true as the spirit of Love lives in me which Correntian so outraged."