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Buck, Charles Neville, 1879-1930

"A Pagan of the Hills"


Then the girl said so faintly that he could hardly hear her:
"Thet's ther fust time thet. . . ." She broke off there.
"I know it, Alexander. I couldn't stay away. I had to come!"
He took a step forward with outstretched arms but she lifted a pleading
hand.
"Don't," she said. "I've got ter think . . . go away now."
And triumphantly confident of what would come out of her meditation, he
turned and picked up his hat and left her standing there. He might
have talked to her of passionate love, he told himself, to the end of
time and it would have meant nothing. Instead he had brought her face
to face with it--and now there was no need of talk.
Jack Halloway had meant it when he admitted to Brent in New York that
it would not do to give rein to his thoughts of Alexander. They were
all lawless thoughts of a love not to be trammeled by the obligations
of marriage.
If he hated the civilized world at times, there were other times when
he could not live without it, and into its conventionalized pattern,
Alexander could never fit. She was not civilized enough or educated
enough to take her place there at his side, nor was she pagan enough to
come to him without terms or conditions.


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