His coming
had altered everything. How could she say what she wanted her life
to be until her relation to him were settled? Everything depended on
that.
This sense of Martin's presence silenced her. "If I can feel," she
said at last, "that I can ask your advice. I have nobody . . . We
all seem . . . Oh! how can I make you understand properly! You never
will have seen anything like our house. It is all so queer. so shut-
up, away from everything. I'm like a prisoner . . ."
And that is perhaps what she was like to Mrs. Mark, sitting there in
her funny ill-fitting clothes, her anxious old-fashioned face as of
a child aged long before her time. Katherine Mark, who had had, in
her life, her own perplexities and sorrows, felt her heart warm to
this strange isolated girl. She had needed in her own life at one
time all her courage, and she had used it; she had never regretted
the step that she had then taken. She believed therefore in courage
. . . Courage was eloquent in every movement of Maggie's square
reliant body.
"She could be braver than I have ever been," she thought.
"Miss Cardinal," she said, "I want you to come here whenever you
can.
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