Left to her own resources Joan found them weak enough. So weak indeed that at last she admitted to herself that the evidences of the curse that had dogged her through life were no matters of distorted imagination. They were real enough. Terribly real. And the admission found her dreading and helpless. She knew she had gone back to the fatal obsession, which, aided by the Padre and her lover, she had so loyally contended. She knew in those dark moments she was weakly yielding. These men had come into her life, had sown fresh seeds of promise, but they had been sown in soil choked with weeds of superstition, and so had remained wholly unfruitful.
How could it be otherwise? Hard upon the heels of Buck's love had come this deadly attack of fate upon him and his. The miracle of it was stupendous. It had come in a way that was utterly staggering. It had come, not as with those others who had gone before, but out of her life. It had come direct from her and hers. And the disaster threatened was not merely death but disgrace, disgrace upon a good man, even upon her lover, which would last as long as they two had life.
The sense of tragedy merged into the maddening thought of the injustice of it. It was monstrous. It was a tyranny for which there was no justification, and it goaded her to the verge of hysteria. Whatever she did now the hand of fate would move on irrevocably fulfilling its purpose to the bitter end. She knew it. In spite of all Buck's confidence, all his efforts to save his friend, the disaster would be accomplished, and her lover would be lost to her in the vortex of her evil destiny.
Fool--fool that she had been. Wicked even, yes, wicked, that she had not foreseen whither her new life was drifting. It was for her to have anticipated the shoals of trouble in the tide of Buck's strong young life. It was for her to have prevented the mingling of their lives. It was for her to have shut him out of her thoughts and denied him access to the heart that beat so warmly for him. She had been weak, so weak. On every count she had failed to prove the strength she had believed herself to possess. It was a heart-breaking thought.
But she loved. It would have been impossible to have denied her love. She would not have denied it if she could. Her rebellion against her fate now carried her further. She had the right to love this man. She had the right which belongs to every woman in the world. And he desired her love. He desired it above all things in the world--and he had no fear.