The man's sheer brutality appalled me.

I believed in him now wholly, I believed at least in his honesty, his vigorous and trenchant loyalty.

But the ways of the man were surely brutal to torture even vermin caught in the trap, and that woman, adventuress though she might be, had flinched before him in agony, as though her very nerves were being hacked out of her body.

And Blenavon, too! Surely he might have remembered that he was her brother.

He might have helped him to retain just a portion of his self-respect.