Pity had driven him first in the direction of love--he remembered
the pang that had racked his heart at the story of the forsaken
Janet--and pity again had urged him to the supreme folly of his
marriage. All his life he had been led astray by a temptation for drink.
"Poor Judy," he said aloud after a minute, "she deserves to be happy and
I'm going to try with all the strength that is in me to make her so."
And then there rose before him, as if it moved in answer to his resolve,
a memory of the past so vivid that it seemed to exist not only in his
thoughts, but in the radiant autumn fields at which he was looking. All
the old passionate sweetness, as sharp as pain, appeared to float there
in the Indian summer before him. Rapture or agony? He could not tell,
but he knew that he had lost it forever.
Turning away, he recrossed the log, and stood for a moment, hesitating,
with his hand on the gate. A decrepit figure, hobbling with bent head
through a golden cloud of dust, signed to him to stop, and while he
waited, he made out the person of old Adam, slightly the worse, he
gathered, for the wedding feast.
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