Forest City press. (Forest City, Potter County, D.T. [S.D.]) 1883-19??, 1912-08-22
THE HEART OF A woman
BY BARONESS ORGY.
Author 81 "Ths Scarlet PimpsrnsL" "Psttieeat Rular Etc.

sSOs ~
Philip and the look Of murder in his
eye. sworn to by the hall porter. She
listened to 1t all. and heard without
coroner put to the witness:
Did Mr.. de Mountford's visitor carry
a stick when he left the cluS?"
"E 'ad a stick. sir, when g came"
was The porter's reply, and I landed
1t to i'm myself when e left"
Louisa had been sitting all this while
at the extreme end Of the row OF chairs
right up against the wall. She sat
with her back to the wall, her head
leaning against it. her hands hidden
within the old OF a monumental sable
muff lying idly in her lap. She had
MIR. Dobson and his clerk: she saw
them all in profile as they looked
straight before them. at the coroner
and at each succeeding witness.
Luke sat farther on. and. as he was
slightly turned toward her. she could
watch his a all the while that she
listened to The hall porter's evidence.
1t was perfectly still, the features as
1t moulded in wax; the eyes, which
ACTUALLY were a clear hazel. appeared
folded, and not a muscle in face or
body moved. No stone carved image
could have been more calm, none could
have been so mysterious.
Louisa tried to understand and could
not. She watched him, not caring
whether the empty HEADED fools who
sat all around saw her watching him
or not.
When the coroner asked the hall por-
Ter about the stick and h man gave
his reply, Luke turned and met
Louisa's liked gaze. The marble like
stiffness of his face remained un-
changed. only the eyes seemed as If
they darkened visibly. At least to her
1T seemed as if a velvety shadow crept
over them. an inscrutable. an noun
derstandable shadow, and the rims as
sumed a purple hue.
1T was her fancy, of course. But
Luke's eyes were naturally bright. of
varying tones Of gray, blue or green.
with never a shadow beneath them.
Now they appeared c%avernous and
dark and again as he met her gaze,
that swift flash OF intense misery.
NO longer had she the feeling that
she was living in q dream, no longer
that this was a theater wherein she
and Luke n the ~ man were pup
pets dancing and squirming for the
benefit OF shallow hearted dots. That
sense OF unreality left her together with
the hysterical desire to laugh which
q plagued her SO in the earlier part
or the proceedings. On the contrary,
now an overwhelming feeling of in
tense reality oppressed her, SO that she
could have screamed with the awful
soul agony which the sight Of Luke's
misery had caused her.
All her nerves were on the rack, her
every faculty concentrated on the one
know.
Love. the omnipotent, had encoun-
tered an enemy-grim, unexplained
mystery-and he sat pondering, almost
coWed by this first check to his SUI
preme might. Louisa had sought and
compelled Luke's gaze and love had
eieamed In one great flash out of her
eyes. Yesterday. at her glance, he had
Knelt at her feet and buried his sorrow
with his aching head in the scented
palm OF h dearly loved hand.
Today the look OF love brought but a
surfelt OF misery and additional load of
sorrow. The eyes in response remained
fearless n hard and circled with the
dark rings Of utter hopelessness.
w grant you that If Louisa Harris
woman endowed with a wonderfully
complex, wonderfully passionate or
wonderfully emotional nature-if in fact
she had been the true product of this
morbid modernity-she would
Whilst admitting Luke's guilt. have
burned with a passion Of SELF sacriSce
plning to stand beside him ptloried in
the dock, and looking forward to a YER
liable world of idealistic realism in the
1orm OF a picturesque suicide, after
gate prison.
But Louisa. though a modern pro-
duct OF an ultra-modern world. was
an absolutely ordinary woman-tust n
commonplace. sensible creature VINO
nougnt n felt in a straight and es-
selltlaily wholesome ann Though
she had read Tolstoi and Dostoyefskv
and every Scandinavian and Russiar;
~crack-brain who has aver tried to make
wrong seem right. black appear white.
ana masquerade as love, yet
she nad v been led away from her
own clean outlook on life.
She loved Luke and would have Civ
en-dld In fact give-her whole life to
him; but she loved him without an
alysis or thought Of self. It never n
tered her mind at this moment to Won
aer II ne were guilty or not guilty, IL
a crime to gain his own ends. All that
her was his misery, which she
would have given her very soul 10 al
leviate, m the hopelessness in him
which had given the world to con-
sole
The mystery troubled her, not the
sin: the marble like rightly of his face.
not the possibility OF the crime.
FOR the moment. however, she was
brought back quickly enough to pre-
sent realities. The coroner-satisfied
with Frederick Powers answers-was
giving him a moments breathing space.
I'M grating OF fountain pens against
paper was heard from that corner Of
the room where sat the Journalists: the
crowd waited silent n expectant, for
present were in proceedings OF this
,kind-yet instinctively every one felt
that. n great crucial moment was i,Ist
ABOUT to come. one great. leading ques-