“Freedom, perhaps.”
“You mean you think that Santa had received word of your husband and that that was why——?”
“I don't want to think or mean; I only want to feel. It's as though I'd been living in a prison and the door had been flung wide. I wasn't one of them. They condemned me. In their hearts they despised me. I was too weak. I couldn't bear their cross.” She clenched her hands against her cheeks till the knuckles showed white. “What's the good of being crucified? It's so much better to live and be glad for people.”
“And Santa,” he asked, “where she's going, what will happen to her?”
She raised her face. “Pain. She'll be hounded and hunted. She's getting too well known. Prince Rogovich thought he recognized her. She'll be always escaping, rushing from hiding to hiding, till one day—— To have been loved so much and to be pushed out of life——”
Behind the mist they heard the creak of ropes running over pulleys. A gasoline engine was started. For an instant the shadow of a trawler loomed through the wall of opaqueness. The tiller was thrust over. She vanished. They stood very silently, listening and watching. In imagination Hindwood followed the vessel's course. It was not of the vessel he was thinking, but of the woman on board her. “To have been loved so much and to be pushed out of life——” If he had had the chance, what could he have done for her? She had fascinated him; but he had not loved her. She was past reclaiming. Love with a woman of her kind would have meant passion—nothing more. A fierce flame, self-consuming! A slow degrading of an emotion that was fine! Yet he was filled with pity and unreasoning remorse. Some day her enemies would overtake her—good, respectable men like Major Cleasby; the good men who by the injustice of their prejudices had made her what she was.
“It's a chapter ended,” he said quietly.
Slipping his arm through hers, as though she already belonged to him, he was turning inland toward the peace of the rolling country, when his step was arrested. He caught the sound of labored breathing and the rattle of sliding chalk. Hands groped above the edge of the cliff, searching for a holding. They were followed by the head and shoulders of a man with a face intensely white, in which a pair of pale green eyes smoldered. Lower down and out of sight a woman spoke. The voice was Santa's.