By which it befell that he was thinking, the half of every day at
least, about Grace Harvey; and her face was seldom out of his mind's
eye; and the more he looked at it, either in fancy or in fact, the
more did it fascinate him. They met but rarely, and then interchanged
the most simple and modest of salutations: but Tom liked to meet her,
would have gladly stopped to chat with her; however, whether from
modesty or from a guilty conscience, she always hurried on in silence.
And she? Tom's request to her, through Willis, to say nothing about
the matter, she had obeyed, as her mother also had done. That Tom
suspected her was a thought which never crossed her mind; to suspect
any one herself was in her eyes a sin; and if the fancy that this man
or that, among the sailors who had carried Tom up to Heale's, might
have been capable of the baseness, she thrust the thought from her,
and prayed to be forgiven for her uncharitable judgment.
But night and day there weighed on that strange and delicate spirit
the shame of the deed, as heavily, if possible, as if she herself had
been the doer. There was another soul in danger of perdition; another
black spot of sin, making earth hideous to her. The village was
disgraced; not in the public eyes, true: but in the eye of heaven, and
in the eyes of that stranger for whom she was beginning to feel an
interest more intense than she ever had done in any human being
before.
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