“This is not him whom I came to see,” said the woman. “This is not him who saved my base body; him who, if he will, may redeem my whole nature.” “I?” cried the incredulous young advocate. “You, my deliverer!” “I--I don’t think I like you; I think you had better go away,” said the young man, with a brutality of which he was unconscious. The woman replied to this speech by sinking slowly to her knees. She lifted the noble line of her chin, which intense suffering had seemed to refine, up towards him with an ineffable gesture of appeal. It almost vouchsafed to him a sense of his own degradation. “I see you as the one whose noble strength will heal me,” she said, prostrating herself more completely, and clasping her arms about his ankles. “Better rise, better leave me,” said Northcote, bewildered by a sense of pity for his own impotence. “You are striking me again,” said the woman with a shudder that even to Northcote seemed terrible, “but every blow you give may help to make me whole.” “What can heal a murderess, a prostitute?” he asked, with a candor of selection that was intended to lacerate. “You. You who brought me out of prison--you who delivered me from a shame to which even I dared not yield.” “Get up,” said Northcote, filled with an unaccountable pang. “Sit there, and try to compose yourself a little.” With an indescribable impulse, which he had no means of fathoming, he raised the trembling, shuddering form by the shoulders, and let it into the chair nearest the fire. The act was wholly without premeditation, but there was nothing in it that partook of the uncouth harshness of his voice. A few scalding drops crept out of her eyes on to his hands, and when he lifted her the heat of her body communicated itself to the tips of his fingers. “Oh, why do you not speak to me with the voice with which you terrified my judges?” she moaned. “I cannot make up my mind about you,” said Northcote calmly. “I do not know whether you are the Magdalene, or whether you are Delilah.” “When you pleaded for my life before my judges yesterday in the court, I looked upon you as Jesus,” said the woman, pressing the tips of her fingers against the balls of her eyes. “At that hour I felt myself to be no less. And I believe there were those among my hearers who had that hallucination too.” “Would _he_ have cut me into pieces when I crept to him for sanctuary?” The young man pressed his hands to his sides. An ineffable anguish had pierced him. “No man ever felt less like that Nazarene than do I this day,” he cried, with a face that was transfigured with terror. “A holocaust has taken place in my nature. I know that I shall never take my stand with the gods any more. Henceforward I am filled with roughness, brutality, and rage; I hate myself, I hate my species.” “Wherefore, O my prince!” “Am I not fallen deeper than her I redeemed from her last ignominy? Have I not prostituted a supreme talent; have I not poisoned the wells of truth?”