I can't keep silent when I see her.
The truth would burst from me lips if I was dumb."
"And you think you would be better if you were out of her sight?"
"Is a starving man better when he is away from food?" asked Sandy,
fiercely. "Heaven knows it's not of meself I'm thinking. It's breaking
her tender heart to see me misery staring her in the face, and I'll
put it out of her sight."
"Is it Ruth?" asked the judge.
Sandy assented with bowed head.
The judge got up and stood before the fire.
"Didn't you know," he began as kindly as he could put it, "that you
were not in her--that is, that she was not of your--"
Sandy lifted blazing eyes, hot with the passion of youth.
"If she'd been in heaven and I'd been in hell, I'd have stretched out
my arms to her still!"
Something in his eyes, in his voice, in his intensity, brought the
judge to his side.
"How long has this thing been going on?" he asked seriously.
"Four years!"
"Before you came here?"
"Yes."
"You followed her here?"
"Yes."
Whereupon the judge gave vent to the one profane word in his
vocabulary.
Then Sandy, having confided so far, made a clean breast of it,
breaking down at the end when he tried to describe Ruth's goodness
and the sorrow his misery had caused her.
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