Royston was nettled by the laughter elicited by this query, with its
obvious fervor of enthusiasm, for she divined that the merriment of the
crowd was charged with ridicule of the incongruous object of his callow
adoration, the forlorn old fortune-teller, who had been so gentle and so
generous, albeit so alien to the civilization of the present day. Lillian
could but realize that the ministering angel is of no time or
nationality, and the transcendent beauty of its apparition may well be a
matter of spiritual and not merely visual perception. The heart of a
woman is no undecipherable palimpsest for the successive register of
fleeting impressions. Here was written in indelible script the tenderest
thought of affection, the kindest charity, and all the soft graces of
fostering sentiment, with no compensatory values of reciprocal loyalty,
or the imposing characters of authority. For the old squaw could not even
understand the justice of the dispensation; it seemed to her that with
impunity she was deserted, denied; her plea was a jest to right reason;
her love, in which the child had once rejoiced, was superfluous,
worthless, now that he had come to his own; her poor hearth, which his
bright infantile smiles had richly illumined, was dark, desolate; the
inexorable logic of law and worldly advantages was beyond her ken, and
she felt that she had only rescued and cherished the little waif that she
herself might be lacerated by grief and bereaved for his sake, and fain
to beat her breast and to heap ashes on her head.
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