"Yes." Then said I, looking at her, "How far do you think pity could
lead one, Vesty--you, so pitiful and kind? Do you think that it could
even lead you--to marry me? To take little Gurd and go away with
me--and help me to live--for pity?"
"No! oh, no!" she gasped.
"Then," said I, grasping hard on my cane with my feeble hand, "as God
wills!"
"Because," said Vesty, "I'm not so unselfish as that. I can't marry
you for that reason--because--I love you!"
The red of the Basin sunset, that would be by and by unsurpassed,
glowed in her cheeks.
As for me--forever a Basin--I dashed my hand across my eyes. A Voice
above land and sea rolled toward me in that moment, through her voice,
in gathering waves that covered all the pitiful accident and despair of
a maimed, halting, birth-marked universe:
"And the crooked places shall be made straight; and the rough places
plain. Then shall the lame man leap as an hart."