"Is it because he is going away or would you have felt this just as much
if he had stayed?" he asked, after a minute in which he had watched her
with humorous compassion.
Raising herself at the question, she pushed the damp hair from her
forehead, and sat facing him on the edge of the platform.
"I could have borne it--if--if I might have had his sermons every Sunday
to help me," she answered, and there was no consciousness of shame,
hardly any recognition of her abasement, in her tone. Like all helpless
victims of great emotions, she had ceased to be merely an individual and
had become the vehicle of some impersonal destructive force in nature.
It was not Judy, but the passion within her that was speaking through
her lips.
"But what good would they have done you? You would have been miserable
still."
"At--at least I should have seen him, an'--an' been strengthened in my
religion---"
The grotesque, the pitiless horror of it struck him for an instant. That
she was half distraught and wholly morbid, he saw from her look, and the
sight awakened that indomitable pity which had served always as a medium
for the biting irony of life.
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