THE STEADFAST HEART
had been a sort of culmination, an exclamation point at the end of a sentence calling the attention of the reader to what had gone before, setting it forth more starkly. She had gone to sleep thinking of Angus—breathlessly, apprehensively. She had been frightened, yet she refused to make any admissions to herself. She told herself there were no admissions to make, except that Angus Burke was using up too much of her thinking time. Yet, withal, she had the sensation of being dragged, pushed, hurried against her will to some destination, and she was afraid of what she did not understand…. She was far from realizing that she desired Angus Burke as the one man necessary to the perfection of her future. She would have refuted the suggestion with scorn, but, nevertheless, lurking in the subconscious depths of her mind was something very like it—and she dared not peer deeper to see if it were so…. Side by side with this subconsciousness, repressed knowledge, crowding it back, endeavoring to strangle it, was the thought of Angus Burke’s parentage, of his dreadful, criminal father; his squalid, degraded mother…. Strangely, but perhaps naturally to one of her vigorous character, she did not consider Angus’s own past, his killing of a man, his imprisonment and trial. Those things were negligible—his parentage was everything. In
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