Not that there was anything strange in the violent revulsion of feeling.
Born and trained among a race who fear to forgive, Eive was familiar by report at least with the merciless vengeance of cowards.

Whatever they might have done later, few would have promised mercy in the very moment of escape to an ordinary assassin; and if Eive understood any aspect of my character, that she could best appreciate was the outraged tenderness which forbade me to look on hers as ordinary guilt.

Acutely sensitive to pain and fear, she had both known the better to what terror might prompt the injured, and was the more appalled by the prospect.

Her eagerness to accept by anticipation whatever degradation and pain domestic power could inflict, when released by the terrible alternative of legal prosecution from its usual limits, breathed more of doubt and terror than of shame or penitence.

But at first it keenly affected me.