Had she fallen in love with this
helpless stranger? or, more awful to contemplate, was he really no
stranger, but a surreptitious lover thus strategically brought under her
roof? For once they refrained from open criticism. The very magnitude of
their suspicions left them dumb.
It was thus that the virgin Chatelaine of Burnt Ridge Ranch was left to
gaze untrammeled upon her pale and handsome guest, whose silken,
bearded lips and sad, childlike eyes might have suggested a more Exalted
Sufferer in their absence of any suggestion of a grosser material
manhood. But even this imaginative appeal did not enter into her
feelings. She felt for her good-looking, helpless patient a profound
and honest pity. I do not know whether she had ever heard that "pity was
akin to love." She would probably have resented that utterly untenable
and atrocious commonplace. There was no suggestion, real or illusive,
of any previous masterful quality in the man which might have made his
present dependent condition picturesque by contrast.
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