The Road To Paradise

As he drove he thought of Lorraine, of her love for her father and her goodness. He already recognized that dominant passion in her, her unselfish adoration of her father--a father who sat all day behind bolted doors trifling with metals and gases and little spinning, noiseless wheels. The selfish to the unselfish, the dead to the living, the dwarf to the giant, and the sinner to the saint--this is the world and they that dwell therein.

He thought of her as he had seen her last, smiling up into the handsome, bearded face that questioned her. No, the wound was nothing--a little blood lost--enough to make her faint at his feet--that was all. But his precious box was safe--and she had flung her loyal arms about the man who saved it and had kissed him before her father, because he had secured what was dearer to her than life--her father's happiness--a little metal box full of it.

Her father was very grateful and very solicitous about her wounded shoulder; but he opened his box before he thought about bandages. Everything was intact, except the conservatory window and his daughter's shoulder. Both could be mended--but his box! ah, that, if lost, could never be replaced.

Jack's throat was hard and dry. A lump came into it, and he swallowed with a shrug, and flicked at a fly on the headstall. A vision of Sir Thorald, bending over little Alixe, came before his eyes. "Pah!" he muttered, in disgust. Sir Thorald was one of those men who cease to care for a woman when she begins to care for them. Jack knew it; that was why he had been so gentle with Molly Hesketh, who had turned his head when he was a boy and given him his first emotions--passion, hate--and then knowledge; for of all the deep emotions that a man shall know before he dies the first consciousness of knowledge is the most profound; it sounds the depths of heaven and hell in the space of time that the heart beats twice.