If my own conscience had allowed me to forget the fact, my father's eagerly inquiring, but sternly unrelenting gaze as I came each evening to his bedside, would have kept it sufficiently in my mind.

I began to feel like one in the power of some huge crushing machine whose slowly descending weight he in vain endeavors to escape.
"How or when the thought of Luttra first crossed my mind I cannot say.

At first I recoiled at the suggestion and put it away from me in disdain; but it ever recurred and with it so many arguments in her favor that before long I found myself regarding it as a refuge.

To be sure she was a waif and a stray, but that seemed to be the kind of wife demanded of me.

She was allied to rogues if not villains, I knew; but then had she not cut all connection with them, dropped away from them, planted her feet on new ground which they would never invade?
I commenced to cherish the idea.