But instead, his gaze went beyond her and he said: "You
surely wouldn't expect me to confess it if I were afraid, would you?
Don't you despise a coward, Miss Dawson?"
The sun was sinking behind the Timanyonis, and the soft glow of the
western sky suffused her face, illuminating it with rare radiance. It
was not, in the last analysis, a beautiful face, he told himself,
comparing it with another whose outlines were bitten deeply and beyond
all hope of erasure into the memory page. Yet the face warming softly in
the sunset glow was sweet and winsome, attractive in the best sense of
the overworked word. At the moment Lidgerwood rather envied Benson--or
Gridley, whichever one of the two it was for whom Miss Dawson cared the
most.
"There are so many different kinds of cowards," she said, after the
reflective interval.
"But they are all equally despicable?" he suggested.
"The real ones are, perhaps. But our definitions are often careless. My
grandfather, who was a captain of volunteers in the Civil War, used to
say that real cowardice is either a psychological condition or a soul
disease, and that what we call the physical symptoms of it are often
misleading.
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