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Buck, Charles Neville, 1879-1930

"A Pagan of the Hills"


But when she was quite free, she stood unsteadily for a moment and then
stepped back and leaned against the wall of the house. Her hands
pressed against the weather-boarding with outspread fingers. Out of a
white face she looked straight before her with eyes preternaturally
wide and full of dazed wonderment.
At first there was no resentment, no denunciation. The girl only
leaned there with parted lips and heaving bosom and that fixed gaze
which, for all its rigid tensity, seemed groping.
It was not as the individual that she now thought of Jack Halloway but
of the terrifying and unexplained force that he had awakened in
herself; the force of things that she never until now realized.
Halloway did not speak. He bent a little toward her, looking at her as
his own breath came fast. At first he did not even marvel at the
stunned, groping blankness of the unmoving features.
He had known that when she awoke it would be with the shock of latent
fires set loose. Now it was a time to go very gently with her, until
she found her footing in fuller comprehension again.


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