If he doubted her insanity at all his suspicion had no stiffer ground than the shallow sand on which reposed his hope[Pg 327] that she was acting. Throughout this passage he did not think to consider her as the child of a great actress. To him she had always been a gentle, sweet, undemonstrative girl, ingenuous in speech, kind, charitable, beloved by the poor, one whose pursuits were amiable and pure. She was nimble and poetical with her pencil. She sang pretty songs prettily. Her beauty informed with a colour of its own the melodies her fingers evoked from the keys or strings of the instruments she touched. He could not think of her as having the talents of an actress, or even the tastes of one. He had never heard of her taking a part in a performance above a charade. Nothing, therefore, but madness or an extraordinary dramatic genius which it was impossible for him to think of her as possessing, could create those parts which she had enacted before him in a manner so immoderately life-like, so absolutely in unison with what he himself could conceive of the behaviour of madness, that deep in his soul might be found the conviction that she had lost her reason, and that his passionate, unprincipled love was the cause of it.,
Billy spent the days preceding the reopening of the Valley School much as a criminal awaiting execution might spend his last hours of life. The fact that Trigger Finger Tim had always accepted the inevitable sentence of fate with calm and undaunted spirit was the one buoy to which he might cling in a turbulent sea of uncertainty. There had been so much to do; so little had been done. The hiding place of old Scroggie's will was still a secret; no check had been put upon the preparations of the interloper who claimed to be the heir of the Scroggie estate; the mystery surrounding the store robbery remained a mystery; his friend Frank Stanhope was growing thin and pale from secret suffering. And on Monday morning the Valley School would open!,
"Croaker," he addressed the bird, "you must'a found ol' Scroggie's gold. He had the only gold money this country ever saw, so you must have found it some way. I don't s'pose it'll do Teacher Stanhope any good, 'cause it'll go to Jim Scroggie's father, but, Croaker, it's up to us to get that money an' turn it over; hear me?".
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