The enduring air suited this woman, Margret Howth.
Her blood could never ebb or flow with sudden gusts of passion,
like his own, throbbing, heating continually: one current,
absorbing, deep, would carry its tide from one eternity to the
other, one love or one hate. Whatever power was in the tide
should be his, in its entirety. It was his right. Was not his
aim high, the highest? It was his right.
Margret, looking up, saw the man's eye fixed on her. She met it
coolly. All her short life, this strange man, so tender to the
weak, had watched her with a sort of savage scorn, sneering at
her childish, dreamy apathy, driving her from effort to effort
with a scourge of contempt. What did he want now with her? Her
duty was light; she took it up,--she was glad to take it up; what
more would he have? She put the whole matter away from her.
It grew late. She sat down by the lamp and began to read to her
father, as usual. Her mother put away her knitting; Joel came in
half-asleep; the Doctor put out his everlasting cigar, and
listened, as he did everything else, intently. It was an old
story that she read,-- the story of a man who walked the fields
and crowded streets of Galilee eighteen hundred years ago.
Knowles, with his heated brain, fancied that the silence without
in the night grew deeper, that the slow-moving air stopped in its
course to listen. Perhaps the simple story carried a deeper
meaning to these brooding mountains and solemn sky than to the
purblind hearts within.
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