Thief and pirate!
How the words clung, how they stung and burnt his brain!
It did not occur to him, being no psychologist, nor learned in the
tortuous workings of the feminine mind, that the fact that she should
bestow upon him those epithets in the very moment and circumstance
of their meeting was in itself curious. He did not perceive the
problem thus presented; therefore he could not probe it. Else he
might have concluded that if in a moment in which by delivering her
from captivity he deserved her gratitude, yet she expressed herself
in bitterness, it must be because that bitterness was anterior to
the gratitude and deep-seated. She had been moved to it by hearing
of the course he had taken. Why? It was what he did not ask
himself, or some ray of light might have come to brighten his dark,
his utterly evil despondency. Surely she would never have been so
moved had she not cared - had she not felt that in what he did there
was a personal wrong to herself. Surely, he might have reasoned,
nothing short of this could have moved her to such a degree of
bitterness and scorn as that which she had displayed.
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