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 for herself, but for the life that was to come, that blinding, blighting thing which has been so comprehensively designated as the finger of scorn.

“Whoever,” said Jamie to a particularly intelligent mocking bird that happened at that minute to be perched on a brace of the pergola near him, “whoever invented that little phrase about the ‘finger of scorn’ didn’t make it half strong enough. What they should have called it was the red-hot poker of scorn, the iron that can be thrust against the breast of a woman and that all her days can sear her soul and be set scorching anew at any unforeseen moment, and all because for a minute she probably loved a man so infinitely better than she loved herself that she risked her soul and lost it, so far as the world is concerned. It is a blessed thing that she did not lose it with God, for there was the Magdalene whom He forgave, and the Magdalene was an old-timer who perhaps deserved what the mob gave her. But after all, God did forgive her, and it wouldn’t do to allow God to be kinder to a woman than a Scotsman would be.”

The mocking bird flirted his tail and cocked his eye and said, quoting an oriole on a plum tree in the garden, “Once more now! Once more now!”

Jamie grinned.

“Have I got to do better than that?” he said. “Well, how would it do if I said that I’d break my word not to try to find the Storm Girl, and start out with the deliberate intention of finding her? And how would it do if I said that I honestly and truly felt the ‘mitigating circum-