"Yes, that's where I want him to go," replied Mazarine slowly.
"Then you ride ahead on the trail, and I'll follow," returned the other
decisively.
"What's the matter? Who hurt him?" he presently called to Mazarine,
riding in front.
"I'll tell you when we get to Tralee," answered the old man, with his
eyes fixed on two lights in the near distance. One was in the kitchen,
where a half-breed woman was giving supper to Li Choo, a faithful
Chinaman roustabout; the other was in the room where a young wife sat
with hands clasped, wondering why her husband did not return, yet glad
that he did not.
CHAPTER VI
"THINGS MUST HAPPEN"
Between two sunrises Louise Mazarine had seen her old world pass in a
flash of flame and a new world trembling with a new life spread out
before her; had come to know what her old world really was. The eyes with
which she looked upon her new world had in them the glimmer not only of
awakened feeling but of awakened understanding. To this time she had
endured her aged husband as a slave comes to bear the lashes of his
master, with pain which will be renewed and renewed, but pain only, and
not the deeper torture of the soul; for she had never really grasped what
their relations meant. To her it had all been part of the unavoidable
misery of life. But on that sunny afternoon when Orlando Guise's voice
first sounded in her ears, and his eyes looked into hers as, pale and
ill, she gazed at him from the window, a revelation came to her of what
the three years of life with Joel Mazarine had really been.
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