She pictured him
waiting, with his hand clasped upon his crutch-stick, his chin resting
upon his hands, his eyes poring on the ground, as she had seen him for
the first time. And as the stable clock chimed the quarters he would
begin to think himself abandoned, forgotten; if, indeed, he took any
count of the passage of time of which she was not sure. His mind seemed
to have sunk into a condition which was between dreaming and waking, a
state to which the outside world seemed only half real--a phase of being
in which there was neither past nor future, only the insufferable
monotony of an everlasting _now_.
Pity is so near akin to love that Mary, in her deep compassion for this
lonely, joyless, loveless existence, felt a regard which was almost
affection for this strange old man, whose very name was unknown to her.
True that there was much in his countenance and manner which was
sinister and repellant. He was a being calculated to inspire fear rather
than love; but the fact that he had courted her presence and looked to
her for consolation had touched Mary's heart, and she had become
reconciled to all that was forbidding and disagreeable in the lunatic
physiognomy.
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