"'It is a score of years my brother, since that moonless August night when the Doomsmen came to Croye and I went back with them, tied to Mad Scarlett's saddle-bow. Twenty years of silence in the City of Silence, and I but a slim, brown-faced maid who might be found one day playing at polo and lamenting her lack of mustachios, and on the very next, mooning over a love charm. It was only through the look in my cousin Philip's eyes, as he died under the weight of the Doomsmen battle-axes, that I knew myself a woman, that I finally entered upon my sex's heritage of sorrow. "'Does this seem an old and hardly remembered tale to you, Anthony Hugolin, Councillor Primus of Croye, and a rich man, if one may judge from the yearly tax rate that stands opposite your name in Dom Gillian's head list? Withal, you are still my brother, and you must listen to what I have now to say, the first and the last word from me to you. "'I must be just and acknowledge that he truly loved me, the man who plucked me like an apple from the bough; later on he made what amends he could by proclaiming me his wife under the Doomsman law. Yet it was a tiger-cat rather than a woman whom he had taken to his bosom, and I wonder now that I did not a thousand times overpass the limits of his forbearance. Assuredly, in that first agony, I tried my hardest to stretch his patience to the breaking-point, in the hope that a knife-thrust might open for me the doors of the prison-house. You see, I was very young, and I could not forget my cousin Philip's eyes. "'A woman's heart is like a cup; it holds but one fixed quantity of life's essential liquor, be the latter sweet or bitter. An infinity of little sips or one deep draught, what does it matter? The vessel is empty in either case. Yet, as time went on, I grew to endure existence; afterwards, when my Esmay was born, I valued it again for her sake. Moreover, she was his daughter as well as mine, and so I came finally to endure and even to welcome the touch of my master's hand. In all these years it had never been aught but gentle, for all that they called him Mad Scarlett, and the children were taught to believe that he always wore gloves, because he had a bloody palm whose stain no water would wash away. Yes, and I wept, as any wife and mother might do, on that gray November day when I knelt beside his bier.