A man grimed with mortar and stone-dust stepped in, and stopped, holding a torch over his head.

Two or three others followed with torches, and stood aside for the tribune to enter.
Respect for women is not all a conventionality, for it is the best proof of their proper nature.

The tribune stopped, because they fled from him--not with fear, be it said, but shame; nor yet, O reader, from shame alone! From the obscurity of their partial hiding he heard these words, the saddest, most dreadful, most utterly despairing of the human tongue: "Come not near us--unclean, unclean!" The men flared their torches while they stared at each other.
"Unclean, unclean!" came from the corner again, a slow tremulous wail exceedingly sorrowful.

With such a cry we can imagine a spirit vanishing from the gates of Paradise, looking back the while.
So the widow and mother performed her duty, and in the moment realized that the freedom she had prayed for and dreamed of, fruit of scarlet and gold seen afar, was but an apple of Sodom in the hand.
SHE AND TIRZAH WERE--LEPERS! Possibly the reader does not know all the word means.

Let him be told it with reference to the Law of that time, only a little modified in this.
"These four are accounted as dead--the blind, the leper, the poor, and the childless." Thus the Talmud.
That is, to be a leper was to be treated as dead--to be excluded from the city as a corpse; to be spoken to by the best beloved and most loving only at a distance; to dwell with none but lepers; to be utterly unprivileged; to be denied the rites of the Temple and the synagogue; to go about in rent garments and with covered mouth, except when crying, "Unclean, unclean!" to find home in the wilderness or in abandoned tombs; to become a materialized specter of Hinnom and Gehenna; to be at all times less a living offence to others than a breathing torment to self; afraid to die, yet without hope except in death.
Once--she might not tell the day or the year, for down in the haunted hell even time was lost--once the mother felt a dry scurf in the palm of her right hand, a trifle which she tried to wash away.