Each morning she greeted him with a
kiss, and each night she came to him to be kissed, and when it was her
pleasure she kissed him--or made him kiss her--when they were on their
long walks. It was bitter-sweet to Keith, and more frequently came the
hours of crushing desolation for him, those hours in the still, dark
night when his hypocrisy and his crime stood out stark and hideous in
his troubled brain.
As this thing grew in him, a black and foreboding thunderstorm on the
horizon of his dreams, an impulse which he did not resist dragged him
more and more frequently down to the old home, and Mary Josephine was
always with him. They let no one know of these visits. And they talked
about John Keith, and in Mary Josephine's eyes he saw more than once a
soft and starry glow of understanding. She loved the memory of this man
because he, her brother, had loved him. And after these hours came the
nights when truth, smiling at him, flung aside its mask and stood a
grinning specter, and he measured to the depths the falseness of his
triumph. His comfort was the thought that she knew. Whatever happened,
she would know what John Keith had been. For he, John Keith, had told
her.
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