There
wasn't any time to lose."
She fell silent, her eyes shining luminously under half closed lids.
She seemed unconscious of his gaze riveted upon her face. It was as
if a curtain had been drawn aside by her painful effort. He was
seeing her clearly now and without cloud of passion--in all her
innocence, her sadness, set sacredly apart from other women by the
long devotion of her thwarted youth. An immense compassion took
possession of him. He could have fallen at her feet praying her
forgiveness for his mean suspicions, his harsh judgment.
The sound of hammers on the veranda roof above their heads appeared
to rouse her.
"Don't you think I ought to tell--everybody?" she asked hurriedly.
He considered her question in silence for a moment. The bitterness
against Andrew Bolton had grown and strengthened with the years into
something rigid, inexorable. Since early boyhood he had grown
accustomed to the harsh, unrelenting criticisms, the brutal epithets
applied to this man who had been trusted with money and had
defaulted. Even children, born long after the failure, reviled the
name of the man who had made their hard lot harder. It had been the
juvenile custom to throw stones at the house he had lived in. He
remembered with fresh shame the impish glee with which, in company
with other boys of his own age, he had trampled the few surviving
flowers and broken down the shrubs in the garden. The hatred of
Bolton, like some malignant growth, had waxed monstrous from what it
preyed upon, ruining and distorting the simple kindly life of the
village.
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