She saw the dreadful mark on his face, began to stagger, and would have fallen. But the arm that, through her son, had struck her heart caught and supported her. The husband bore his wife once more to her room, and the foolish son was left alone on the floor, smarting in pain, ashamed, and full of fear for his wife, yet in ignorance that his father had so violently whipped her.

A moment more and he rose. As he did, all at once he realized that the terror of his father was gone. They had met, and his father had put himself in the wrong. He was no more afraid of him. It was not hate that had cast out fear. I do not say that he felt no resentment. Cornelius was not quite so noble as that. But it consoled him that he had been hardly used by his father. He had been accustomed to look vaguely up to his father as a sort of rigid but righteous divinity. In a disobedient, self-indulgent, poverty-stricken nature like his, reverence could only take the form of fear. And now that he had seen his father in a rage, the feeling of reverence, such as it was, had begun to give way, and with it the fear. They were more upon a level. And too, his father’s unmerciful use of the whip to him seemed a sort of settling of scores, thence in a measure, a breaking down of the wall between them. A weight as of a rock was lifted from his mind by this violent blowing up of the horrible negation that had been between them so long. He felt—as when punished in boyhood—as if the storm had passed, and the sun had begun to appear. He did not yet know to what a state his wife was brought. He knew she was safe with Hester.

He listened, and finding all quiet, stole, smarting and aching, slowly to his room and there tumbled into bed, longing for Amy to come to him. He was an invalid, after all, and could not go about looking for her! It was her part to find him! In a few minutes he was fast asleep once more, and forgot everything in dreams of the garret with Amy.

When Mrs. Raymount came to herself, she looked up at her husband. He stood expecting such reproaches as never yet in their married life she had given him. But she stretched out her arms to him and drew him to her. Her pity for the misery that could have led him to behave so horribly joined to her sympathy in the distressing repentance she did not doubt must have already begun.