Page:The leopard's spots - a romance of the white man's burden-1865-1900 (IA leopardsspotsrom00dixo).pdf/367



ASTON tried to wait in patience another week for a word from the woman he loved, and when the last mail came and brought no letter for him, he found himself face to face with the deepest soul crisis of his life.

After all, thoughts are things. The report of her social frivolities at first made little impression on him. But the thought had fallen in his heart, and it was growing a poisoned weed.

It is possible to kill the human body with an idea. The fairest day the spring ever sent can be blackened and turned from sunshine into storm by the flitting of a little cloud of thought no bigger than a man's hand.

So Gaston found this report of dancing and flirting in a gay society by the woman whom he had enthroned in the holy of holies of his soul to be destroying his strength of character, and like a deadly cancer eating his heart out.

He sat down by his window that night, unable to work, and tried to reconcile such a life with his ideal.

"Why should I be so provincial!" he mused. "The thing only shocks me because I am unused to it. She has grown up in this atmosphere. To her it is a harmless pastime."

Then he took out of his desk her picture, lit his lamp and looked long and tenderly at it, until his soul was drunk again with the memory of her beauty, the