Page:Caroline Lockhart--The Fighting Shepherdess.djvu/267

 her that she had seen before — hard-featured, domineering, unloved, unloving, chafing in ghastly solitude, alone with her sheep and her money, and the best years of her life behind her. She saw herself as her work and her thoughts would make her. For an instant she wavered. If Disston had known, he might have swayed her then, but, since he could not, he only said with an effort:

"If your love for me isn't big enough to make you abandon this purpose, I shan't urge you. I know it would be useless. You have a strange nature, Kate — a mixture of steel and velvet, of wormwood and honey."

Absorbed in the swiftly moving panorama that was passing before her, she scarcely heard him. She was gazing at a bizarre figure in a wreath of paper roses trip down a staircase, radiant and eager — to be greeted by mocking eyes and unsuppressed titters ; at a crowded courtroom, staring mercilessly, tense, with unfriendly curiosity; at Neifkins with his insolent stare, his skin, red, shiny, stretched to cracking across his broad, square-jawed face; at Wentz, listening in cold amusement to a frightened, tremulous voice pleading for leniency; at a sallow face with dead brown eyes leering through a cloud of smoke, suggesting in contemptuous familiarity, " Why don't you fade away — open a dance hall in some live burg and get a liquor license ? " ; at Mrs. Toomey, pinched with worry and malnutrition, a look of craven cowardice in her blue eyes, blurting out in the candor of desperation, "Your friendship might hurt us in our business!"

She saw it all — figures and episodes passed in review before her, even to irrelevant details, and each contributed its weight to turn the scales in this crisis.

"It's the fork of the road," she said in curt decision, " and I've chosen."

There was something so implacable in her face and