As he went out Dolly beckoned me quickly to her.
“I heard you tell me to leave go,” she said, hurriedly, in a low voice; “but I couldn’t—Renny, I couldn’t; and you saved my life.”
Her lips were trembling and her eyes full of tears. She clasped her hands and held them entreatingly toward me.
A gust of some strange feeling—some yearning sense of protection toward this pretty, lovable child—flooded my heart.
“You poor little thing,” I whispered, in a pitying voice, and taking her two hands in one of mine I passed my other arm around her.
Then she lifted her face eagerly and I bent and softly dropped a kiss on her warm, wet lips.
The moment I had done it I felt the shame of my action.
“There, dear, forgive me,” I said. “Like you, Dolly, I couldn’t let go at once,” and our friend returning just then with the blanket, we left the girl to herself and stepped outside.
A queer exultant feeling was on me—a sense as of the lightening of some overburdening oppression. “A life for a life.” Why should the words ring stilly, triumphantly in my brain? I might earn for my breast a cuirass of medals such as Dolly had desired, and what would their weight be as set in the scale against the one existence I had terminated?
Perhaps it was not that. Perhaps it was that I felt myself for the first time in close touch with a yearning human sympathy; that its tender neighborhood taught me at a breath to respect and stand by what was noble in myself. The shadow that must, of course, remain with me always, I would not have away, but would only that it ceased to dominate my soul’s birthright of independence.