But Panna's senses were closed to all this varied beauty. Her whole
existence, all her thoughts and feelings were now centred upon a single
point, the purpose which brought her to the city. With a torturing
effort, which drove the blood to her brain, she again reviewed the
events of the past month, of her whole life. She strove to examine
them on all sides, judge them impartially, consider them from various
standpoints.
Was it right that Abonyi should now be at liberty to move about as the
great lord he had always been, after being permitted to make himself
comfortable for six months in a prison, which was no jail to him? Was
it not her duty to execute the justice which neither the laws nor men
would practise? Had she not a perfect right to do so, since she, and
those who belonged to her, had hitherto always atoned fully and
completely, rigidly and more than rigidly, for every sin?
In her early childhood her soul had been ravaged by a terrible grief,
which had never been overcome; the law had killed her brother; in her
girlhood, she had been tortured by only too frequent repetitions of the
sight of her father, whom the law had loaded with chains and punished
with severe imprisonment; her sorely wounded heart had found
consolation only in a single thought which, amid her sufferings and
afflictions, had gradually become established as firmly as a rock
within her soul, that every sin found a harsh punishment, that this was
an immovable, inexorable law of the universe, which could not be
escaped, that it would be easier to pluck the stars from the sky than
to do wrong without atoning for it.
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