The old woman paused and reflected with grim satisfaction on the remote days of an Israelitish triumph.

“Meanwhile,” she continued finally, “thy grandsire lived humbly in Goshen.  None dreamed that this keeper of a little flock, lord over a little tent and tiller of a few acres, was the great Syrian merchant who was despoiling Mizraim.

“Next he became a money-lender, through his steward, to the Egyptians, and wrested from them what they had saved in putting Israel to toil without hire.  So his riches increased a hundredfold and the half of noble Egypt was beholden to him.  Then he turned to aid his oppressed brethren.

“He bribed the taskmasters or kept watch over them and discovered wherein they were false to the Pharaoh, and held their own sin over their heads till they submitted through fear of him.  He filled Israel’s fields with cattle, the hills with Hebrew flocks, the valleys with corn.  Alas!  Had it not been—­but, nay, Jehovah was not yet ready.  He had chosen Moses to lead Israel.”

The old woman paused and sighed.  After a silence she continued: 

“Thy father fell heir to the most of his wealth, but not to his immunity.  With a heart as great as his sire’s he continued the good work.  He wedded thy mother, the daughter of another free Israelite, and in his love for her, never was man more happy.  In the midst of his hope and his peace an enemy betrayed him to Rameses, the Incomparable Pharaoh.  And Rameses remembered not his father’s covenant.  So Maai’s lands, his flocks, his home, were taken; thou, but new-born, and thy mother with her people were sent to the brick-fields—­himself and his brothers to the mines; and in a few years thou wast all that was left of thy father’s house.”

The effect of this recital on the young Israelite was deep.  Anguish, wrath, and the pain that intensifies these two, helplessness, inflamed her soul.  The story was not entirely new to her; she had heard it, a part at a time, in her childhood; but now, her understanding fully developed, the whole history of her family’s wrongs appealed to her in all its actual savagery.  Egypt, as a unit, like a single individual, had done her people to death.  Between her and Egypt, then, should be bitter enmity, rancor that might never be subdued, and eternal warfare.  Her enemy had conquered her, had put her in bondage, and made sport of her as a pastime.  The accumulation of injury and insult seemed more than she could bear, and the vague hope of Israel in Moses seemed in the face of Egypt’s strength a folly most fatuous.

“O Egypt!  Egypt!” she exclaimed with concentrated passion.  “What a debt of vengeance Israel owes to thee!”

The old woman laid her shriveled hands on the arm of her ward.

“Aye, and it shall be paid,” she said fiercely.  “Thou canst not get thy people back, nor alleviate for them now the pangs that killed them; but to the mortally wronged there is one restitution—­revenge!”