They rang with sincerity. The reproach was
genuine. She had meant just what she said. And still he
pondered.
The next time he encountered her she had turned away from him
angrily and contemptuously. And yet again, she came to him to
beg his pardon, and she dropped a hint of a man somewhere,
sometime,--she said not how,--who had left her with no desire to
live. Her speech was frank, but incoherent, and all he gleaned
from it was that the event, whatever it was, had happened years
before. Also, he gleaned that she had loved the man.
That was the thing--love. It caused the trouble. It was more
terrible than frost or famine. Women were all very well, in
themselves good to look upon and likable; but along came this
thing called love, and they were seared to the bone by it, made
so irrational that one could never guess what they would do next.
This Freda-woman was a splendid creature, full-bodied, beautiful,
and nobody's fool; but love had come along and soured her on the
world, driving her to the Klondike and to suicide so compellingly
that she was made to hate the man that saved her life.
Well, he had escaped love so far, just as he had escaped
smallpox; yet there it was, as contagious as smallpox, and a
whole lot worse in running its course.
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