aid, for, try as she might, she could not soften down
her thunderous voice into a whisper.

"I know him," said she, "he will soon get used to this place.... Nobody
will look for him here.... Get away from here? How can he?"

Presently she placed a dish of boiled flesh before her guests. The pale
youth picked at his food slowly and sadly, the other attacked it with
ravenous haste, throwing a word over his shoulder to the woman the
while, or urging his comrade to eat, or flinging bones to the dog and
kicking him viciously in the ribs when he snapped them up.

"Can one have a word with the old man?" he inquired of the woman.

"Let him bide, the old man is plagued with his devils again. Don't you
hear how he sings? Why, he voices it as lustily as any Slovak student on
St Lucia's day."

And indeed from some room far away now came this verse of a well-known
hymn, sung in a deep vibrating voice full of a woeful, contrite
tremulousness:

"Oh, Lord, the number of our sins
And vileness, who shall purge?
Withhold the fury of Thy wrath,
Though we deserve its pouring forth,
And stay Thy chastening scourge!"

Melancholy, heart-rending was the sense of penitence conveyed by this
deep, vibrating, bell-like voice. A penitential hymn in the house of the
headsman!

The sad-faced youth shivered at the sound of this voice and seemed to
awake suddenly from out of a reverie. He passed his hand once or twice
across his forehead as if to rally his wits and reduce the chaos within
and around him to some sort of order, but gradually sank back again into
his former lethargy.

A short time afterwards the same hymn was heard again; but the voice of
the singer this time was not the sonorous, manly voice they had heard
before, it was a heavenly, pure, childlike voice which now began to
sing, full of the magic charm and sweetness of a crystal harmonica:

"Yet know we, Lord, whoso repents
And turns his heart to Thee,
Shall aye find favour in Thy sight;
Nor wilt thou hide from him Thy light,
Thy mercy he shall see."

Angels in Heaven could not have sung more sweetly than the voice that
sang this verse. Who could it be? An angel proclaiming remission of sins
in the house of the headsman!

"So the old cut-throat still keeps the girl under a glass case, eh?"

"He wants to bring her up as a saint on purpose to aggravate me, for he
knows very well that I never could endure anything of the sain