Page:Frank Packard - The Miracle Man.djvu/212

 the picture of Mrs. Thornton lying on the brass bed in the car compartment that night, every line of the pale, gentle face as vivid, as actual as though it were once more before her in reality, and in her ears rang again, stabbing her with their unmeant condemnation, those words of sweetness, love and purity that held her up to gaze upon herself in ghastly, terrifying mockery.

It stupified her, bewildered her, frightened her. She seemed, for days and weeks now, to be drifting with a current that, eddying, swirling, swept her this way and that. How wonderful it was, this life she was now leading compared with the old life—so full of the better things, the better emotions, the better thoughts that she had never known before! How monstrous in its irony that she was leading it to steal, that she might play her part in a criminal scheme for a criminal end! And yet, somehow, it did not all seem sham, this part she played—and that very thought, too, frightened her. Why was it now that Madison's oft-attempted, and as oft-repulsed, kiss upon her lips was something from which she shrank and battled back, no longer from a sense of pique or to bring him to his knees, but because something new within her, intangible, that she did not understand, rose up against it! Why did she do this—she, who had known the depths, who had known no other guide or mentor than the turbulent, passionate love she had yielded him and in her abandonment had once found contentment! Was her love for him gone? Or, if it was not that—what was it?