At this the women would have run away, but each encouraged the other. "Poor creature! She is mad," they signed and whispered to each other. Then they threw a mantle over her. "Ye will hide me, will ye not?" she said, pleadingly, and her wild sweetness melted their hearts. They soothed her and led her homewards by unfrequented byways. "Where are thy friends, thy parents?" "Dead, scattered--what know I? O those days of blood!" She shuddered violently. "Baptism or death! But they were strong. I see a Cossack dragging my mother along with a thong round her neck. 'Here's a red ribbon for you, dear,' he cries with laughter; they betrayed us to the Cossacks, those Greek Christians within our gates--the Zaporogians dressed themselves like Poles--we open the gates--the gutters run blood--oh, the agonies of the tortured!--oh! father!" They hushed her cries. Too well they remembered those terrible days of the Chmielnicki massacres, when all the highways of Europe were thronged with haggard Polish Jews, flying from the vengeance of the Cossack chieftain with his troops of Haidamaks, and a quarter of a million of Jewish corpses on the battle-fields of Poland were the blunt Cossack's reply to the casuistical cunning engendered by the Talmud. "They hated my father," the strange beautiful creature told them, when she was calmer. "He was the lessee of the Polish imposts; and in order that he might collect the fines on Cossack births and marriages, he kept the keys of the Greek church, and the Pope had to apply to him, ere he could celebrate weddings or baptisms--they offered to baptize him free of tax, but he held firm to his faith; they impaled him on a stake and lashed him--oh, my God! And the good sisters found me weeping, a little girl, and they took me to the convent and were kind to me, and spoke to me of Christ. But I would not believe, no, I could not believe. The psalms and lessons of the synagogue came back to my lips; in visions of the night I saw my father, blood-stained, but haloed with light.