So had come about her hasty marriage with her young officer, whom Virginia
rewarded for his service with land; so had followed the breaking of all
ties, to journey by his side into the wilderness, there to undergo hardship,
perhaps death itself after captivity and torture such that no man who has
ever loved a woman can even look another man in the face and name.
Thus ever on and on unwittingly he wove the fibres of her life about him as
his shirt of destiny: following the threads nearer, always nearer, toward
the present, until he reached the day on which he had first met her on his
in the wilderness. From that time, he no longer relied upon hearsay, but
drew from his own knowledge of her to fill out and so far to end all these
fond tapestries of his memory and imagination.
But as one who has traversed a long gallery of pictures, and, turning to
look back upon all that he has passed, sees a straight track narrowing away
into the dimming distance, and only the last few life scenes standing out
lustrous and clear, so the school-master, gazing down this long vista,
beheld at the far end of it a little girl, whom he did not know, playing on
the silvery ancestral lawns of the James; at the near end, watching by his
bedside on this rude border of the West, a woman who had become
indispensable to his friendship.
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