It
was his heart that drove him into such a decision, although he
conceived it then to be the reasoning of the brain.
And so she was Naida Gillis, poor old Gillis's little girl! He stopped
suddenly in the road, striving to realize the thought. He had never
once dreamed of such a consummation, and it staggered him. His thought
drifted back to that pale-faced, red-haired, poorly dressed slip of a
girl whom he had occasionally viewed with disapproval about the
post-trader's store at Bethune, and it seemed simply an impossibility.
He recalled the unconscious, dust-covered, nameless waif he had once
held on his lap beside the Bear Water. What was there in common
between that outcast, and this well-groomed, frankly spoken young
woman? Yet, whoever she was or had been, the remembrance of her could
not be conjured out of his brain. He might look back with repugnance
upon those others, those misty phantoms of the past, but the vision of
his mind, his ever-changeable divinity of the vine shadows, would not
become obscured, nor grow less fascinating. Let her be whom she might,
no other could ever win that place she occupied in his heart.
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