Of course the facts had shown that she could not have been
directly responsible for his injury, but it was a haunting thing to
remember as happening almost simultaneously with her disappearance
into the sea.
He drew away from the window and, opening the door, went out into the
night. Cool breaths of air gave a crinkly rattle to the swinging paper
lanterns, and he could hear the soft whipping of the flags which Mary
Standish had placed over his cabin. There was something comforting in
the sound, a solace to the dishevelment of nerves he had suffered, a
reminder of their day in Skagway when she had walked at his side with
her hand resting warmly in his arm and her eyes and face filled with the
inspiration of the mountains.
No matter what she was, or had been, there was something tenaciously
admirable about her, a quality which had risen even above her feminine
loveliness. She had proved herself not only clever; she was inspired by
courage--a courage which he would have been compelled to respect even in
a man like John Graham, and in this slim and fragile girl it appealed to
him as a virtue to be laid up apart and aside from any of the motives
which might be directing it. From the beginning it had been a
bewildering part of her--a clean, swift, unhesitating courage that had
leaped bounds where his own volition and judgment would have hung
waveringly; that one courage in all the world--a woman's courage--which
finds in the effort of its achievement no obstacle too high and no abyss
too wide though death waits with outreaching arms on the other side.
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