There had been a reason for St. Pierre's masterly
possession of himself, and it had not been, as he had thought,
because of his bigness of soul. It was because he had not cared.
He was a splendid hypocrite, playing his game well at the
beginning, but betraying the lie at the end. He did not love
Marie-Anne as he, Dave Carrigan, loved her. He had spoken of her
as a child, and he had treated her as a child, and was serenely
dispassionate in the face of a situation which would have roused
the spirit in most men. And suddenly, recalling that thrilling
hour in the white strip of sand and all that had happened since,
it flashed upon David that St. Pierre was using his wife as the
vital moving force in a game of his own--that under the masquerade
of his apparent faith and bigness of character he was sacrificing
her to achieve a certain mysterious something it the scheme of his
own affairs.
Yet he could not forget the infinite faith Marie-Anne Boulain had
expressed in her husband. There had been no hypocrisy in her
waiting and her watching for him, or in her belief that he would
straighten out the tangles of the dilemma in which she had become
involved.
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