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DALLA S GALBRA ITH.
-—the old stain would shut him for ever into a solitary life.
“ Good-bye,” she said. For his answer he took her in his arms and kissed her. He quickly put her down, white with indignation, and drew back from her.
“ You think me rude and vulgar.
I am
sorry. I could not help it.” He added earnestly: “ It does not seem wrong or vulgar to me.” Honora made an imperious gesture of dismissal: “Go! I—I am sorry.” These words went like a knife to Gal
braith’s heart.
She had trusted him as
an equal, and now she thought him a boor. He looked at her a moment sor rowfully enough, bowed without speak
Umy
all the world to him he had driven from him, to-night, irretrievably. “ It is a dark day,” said Dallas. There was heat in the man’s long
jaws which had not been there since the old Manasquan days. The grave, dark blue eyes were sparkling and alive. “Hillo, Turk!" he called; and when the dog came sleepily to him he pulled him up and wrestled with him, laughing, and with no gentle hand, as if life. and
youth, and good-fellowship were brimful in his heart, and he must find some liv
ing thing to caress, if it were but a dog. When Turk went off again, surly, to his nap, Galbraith stood up, stretching his long arms restlessly, looking down the road and then up at the sky. He could
ing, and went slowly down the hill. “But
not sleep.
I was not wrong nor vulgar,” he said, doggedly to himself. While Honora,
body there was but one conscious point —his mouth, on which a touch lay light and warm. Had he found in it to-night that cordial which his hard early life had never tasted? Or was he simply one of those men who never know when fate has worsted them? However that may be, the Dallas Gal braith who walked vehemently up the
when he was gone, buried her face in her hands and laughed hysterically. Could Colonel Pervis or Mr. Dour have done this thing? But they were thorough-bred —gentlemen. How could one know what to expect from a wild man of the woods ? It was as if one had laid hold on Behemoth; and then she sat down among the flower-pots and sobbed and cried until her heart was sick.
Of all his strong, brawny
hill to the woods, only to throw himself down under a beech tree, was ten years a younger man than the one who had
gone out from the Indian Queen this The Indian Queen, long before Gal braith’s return, was sound asleep in the moonlight. Even Turk, the watch-dog, who regarded robbers as one of the illu sions of his youth, was as usual stretched
on the porch snoring, his head between his paws. Dallas sat down on the mossy pump-trough : his brain was on fire, the
close air of the house choked him. Why should a man be shut up in a box until after he was dead P After all, any house was a jail! He must have the free air to think over his future life clearly. But he did not think at all. That he
ought to be miserable was plain enough. No man could be in a worse case. To morrow he must go out to face the world, penniless and untaught, with the leprous mark of the prison upon him, awaking
suspicion against him in the kindest, broadest, human sympathy. The wo man who already counted for more than
morning. The luck which was against him had vanished out of his sight. As for the disaster that closed in upon him on every side, the thought of it only
roused in him the hot, buoyant glow with which he used to fight his way along the beach through the nor‘-easters that wet him to the skin. He was going to live out of doors now, thank God ! He had done with houses. He began to troll out one of the old fishing-songs, and his
magnificent voice echoed through the woods like a trumpet-note of victory. He was so busy with his own fancies and his song that he did not hear the rolling wheels of a buggy on the road. “ Ho, Galbraith! Galbraith!
There’s
nobody fool enough to be shouting in the woods at midnight but that fellow! Gal braith, I say!”
The shouting suddenly ceased, and in
