But it had cost her none the less hardly because so manfully
done; none the less did all the violent, ruthless hate, the vivid,
childlike fury, the burning, intolerable jealousy of her nature combat
in her with the cruel sense of her own unlikeness with that beauty which
had subdued even herself, and with that nobler impulse of self-sacrifice
which grew side by side with the baser impulses of passion.
As she crouched down by the side of the fire all the gracious, spiritual
light that had been upon her face was gone; there was something of the
goaded, dangerous, sullen ferocity of a brave animal hard-pressed and
over-driven.
Her native generosity, the loyal disinterestedness of her love for
him, had overborne the jealousy, the wounded vanity, and the desire of
vengeance that reigned in her. Carried away by the first, she had, for
the hour, risen above the last, and allowed the nobler wish to serve and
rescue him to prevail over the baser egotism. Nothing with her was ever
premeditated; all was the offspring of the caprices of the impulse
of the immediate moment. And now the reaction followed; she was only
sensible of the burning envy that consumed her of this woman who seemed
to her more than mortal in her wonderful, fair loveliness, in her
marvelous difference from everything of their sex that the camp and the
barrack ever showed.
"And I have sent him to her when I should have fired my pistol into her
breast!" she thought, as she sat by the dying embers.
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