At her feet Hannah knelt, as if she had flung herself in her daughter's path, her arms clasping the young figure close to her and an agony of appeal stamped on her upraised face.

The last of the rich color had died out of the girl's face and with pitiful eyes and quivering lips she was stroking the desperate hands that meant to keep her for ever.
Except for the sudden sobbing of the woman servant, tense and anguished silence prevailed.

The old merchant was confronted with a perplexity that found him without fortitude to solve.

He felt his strength slip from him.

He, too, covered his face with his hands.
At the opposite arch another house servant appeared, lifted a distorted, blackening face and, doubling like a wounded snake, fell upon the floor.
A moment of stupefied silence in which Hannah, with her mother instincts never so acutely alive, turned her strained vision upon the writhing figure.