But there was another thought that stabbed him with a keener pain.

Paulina and her family would learn that they need no longer fear him, that they could do without him, and then they would escape from his control.

And this Rosenblatt dreaded above all things else.

To lose the power to keep in degradation the wife and children of the man he hated with a quenchless hatred would be to lose much of the sweetness of life.
Those few terrible moments when he had lain waiting for the uplifted knife of his foe to penetrate his shrinking eyeballs had taken years from him.

He had come back to his life older, weaker, broken in nerve and more than ever consumed with a thirst for vengeance.