“No, no!...” The man’s voice was a desperate gasp merely. “Never shall I give counsel who could not advise my own child against dishonor”—holding his wife from him still, though the poor creature worked toward him on her knees. “Never shall I beget children again who have been betrayed by my own child.... Ah ... let me go ... let me go ... and by service ... by forgetting....” There was something almost of madness in his wounded desperation. I suppose his wife must have seen that. She left off entreaty and took his hand, fondling it quietly, turning as she was, upon her knees, toward Persilope and the elders, quite broken and submissive. “It is best you let him go,” she said, “he will be happier so.” Prassade caught at this, his lip was wet with eagerness. “Ay, ay, how can I know happiness again? She knows I cannot.” “Are you sure,” said Persilope to the wife, “that you are prepared for ... that you understand?” “I understand,” she answered back, neither of them looking at the man in question. “If it means peace for him, I am....” She threw out her hands to show how obedient she was to destiny. “Am I accepted, chief; am I accepted?” The man trembled with the hope of deliverance. “You are accepted,” the chief admitted, seeing there was no one disposed to deny him. There was a space of stillness in the bright palpitating noon before Persilope, measuring the heap of gold and jeweled vessels with his eye, had turned back and said: “It wants yet another.” Then I saw his wife leaning a little from where she sat with her glance still fixed and compelling. I followed it past the line of elders and found it fixed on Ravenutzi. Before I could shape in my mind what wordless urgency lay behind that look, I saw the smith rise slowly, and stepping carefully among the rows of seated captives, come and stand beside Prassade and the two others. Trastevera sunk backward in her seat with the look of one justified in a long belief. “I,” he said, “offer myself.” At this simple and unexpected intrusion of the smith into the situation, there burst from the Outliers a sudden sharp hiss of refusal and indignation. It was followed instantly after by harsh ironical laughter. Cries sounded, here and there two arms and a head cast up, like the crest of a wolf out of a pack, protestingly, and hands pulled him down again. “The smith, the smith!” they cried. “A reparation, a reparation!”