a pleasant sight! one blind man, looking eternally into the blackness of his life, and chained to a pillar of stone—that was bad enough; but multiply that by twenty! was it worse? could it be worse? could twenty men suffer more than one man? and then a thought came to me, a terrible, impossible thought, so horrible that i doubted my logic. but now two and two were beginning to make four. could those men be the masters? they came and bought and left—to go to the cellar and stay there!

"oh! donna marchesi!" i whispered. "how about those cat-eyes? if you had a hand in this, you are not a woman. you are a tiger."