Amazing and stupefying as was this sudden change, yet it never seemed madness to Barney, nor was it for even a moment inexplicable. It was what he was to expect, he said to himself. "She thought me over, when she realized what she had done; and of course, she couldn't have me."
After his hours of walking the streets, he threw himself across his bed in his room and tried to think.
He seemed to be a little boy again, in ragged shirt and trousers, sitting beside Azen Mabo on the seat of the rude, Indian-made wagon, driving into Charlevoix with bark canoes and reed baskets to sell; and Ethel seemed to him one of the little girls, fair and gay in light summer dresses, who gazed at him curiously for a moment and then looked away and forgot him. His Indian upbringing of those early years had fastened upon him a fatalism by which he was apt to interpret events as the result of omens; and to-day he took that memory as a portent of his life. "Of course I should have known," he repeated. "They looked, and looked away."
As he lay there, memories also crowded back to him of the good Franciscan fathers who talked to him about himself when he was a boy. The holy Fathers, he knew, themselves did not marry; and this was because marriage was of the flesh; and it seemed that children were born "in sin"; and Barney discovered that he himself was considered to have been born in particularly odious sin. Undoubtedly his mother had suffered for it, though the good Saviour, who himself had been merciful to the Magdalene, may have forgiven her; undoubtedly his father either had suffered or was sure to pay penance; and, also, Barney himself
