CHAPTER XXVI
THE GREATEST THING
IT was unconquerable. The very greatness, the bigness of the man nourished it and fostered it until, beating down his defences, routing him, it dominated and owned him. A strange paradox? No—rather the inevitable.
A foreshadowing of it had come to Varge on that night of wild turmoil when he had faced death, had momentarily expected it, on the storm-swept schooner's deck—but only a foreshadowing—he had not realised it all then. Perhaps, if he had never seen her again, in time he might have come to hold his love as a cherished, hallowed memory, a shrine at which he might kneel, a secret source of strength inspiring him, by thought of her, to keep ever sacred and inviolate the finest and best ideals of manhood—but it was more than that now. It had been more than that since that evening on the beach when, for an instant, the mad thought had come to him that she, in all her glorious, fresh young innocence and beauty, in all her tender purity and sweetness, cared for him—a nameless man, an escaped convict, a branded felon. Yes; he had put it from him—then. Not easily—for then in all its meaning, in all its depth, as it had not come to him before, had come the knowledge of the fulness, the completeness of his own love. After that, as a man outwardly himself but mentally almost oblivious and indifferent to events and happenings around
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