It was too
clean. Too white. Too pure. It would have frightened her, tortured her.
She could not have found the poison she required to give her life. Her
unclean desires would have driven her mad. So he arraigned her,
terribly, without malice, and without pity. And then, like the quieting
touch of a gentle hand in his brain, came the thought of the other
woman--the Girl--whose picture he carried in his pocket. This was _her_
world that he was entering. She was up there--somewhere--and he looked
over the barriers of the forest to the northwest. Hundreds of miles
away. A thousand. It was a big world, so vast that he still could not
comprehend it. But she was there, living, breathing, _alive_! A sudden
impulse made him draw the picture from his pocket. He held it down
behind a bale, so that Father Roland would not chance to see it if he
looked back. He unwrapped the picture, and ceased to puff at his pipe.
The Girl was wonderful to-day, under the sunlight and the blue halo of
the skies, and she wanted to speak to him. That thought always came to
him first of all when he looked at her. She wanted to speak. Her lips
were trembling, her eyes were looking straight into his, the sun above
him seemed to gleam in her hair.
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