For him the
crown of happiness could be found in loyal service. Of love-making in
its ordinary sense, Vardri neither thought nor dreamed. To have found
his Ideal, the one woman, surely that was enough. The innate
fastidiousness that goes with good breeding had kept his life clean,
his hands unsoiled.
He had hated the other women in the Circus, and felt sorry for them at
the same time; and on their side they liked him and regarded him
somewhat as a fool. Their voices, their coarse expressions, their
light jokes all jarred on him.
He pitied them, for their lives were as hard as his own, and when he
could he helped them, for among the wanderers in Bohemia there is an
ever-abiding comradeship. The element of fanaticism in his nature,
which had once been absorbed by the Cause, now spent itself upon a
human being.
The firm yet gentle clasp in which he held her, was the outward symbol
of the love and courage that made him tense as steel. To every man
there comes his hour, and his was now. Both for her sake and his own
he dare not keep her with him.
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