But Truedale was spared the worry this knowledge might have brought him.
He concentrated now upon the present and grimly accepted conditions as
they were. All power or inclination for struggle was past; the
inheritance of weakness which old William Truedale had feared and with
which Conning himself had so contended in his barren youth, asserted
itself and prepared to take unquestioningly what the present offered.
At that moment Truedale believed himself arbiter of his own fate and
Nella-Rose's. Conditions had forced him to this position and he was
ready to assume responsibility. There was no alternative; he must
accept things as they were and make them secure later on. For himself
the details of convention did not matter. He had always despised them.
In his youthful spiritual anarchy he had flouted them openly; they made
no claim upon his attention now, except where Nella-Rose was concerned.
Appearances were against him and her, but none but fools would allow
that to daunt them. He, Truedale, felt that no law of man was needed to
hold him to the course he had chosen, back on the day when he determined
to forsake the past and fling his fortunes in with the new. Never in his
life was Conning Truedale more sincere or, he believed, more wise, than
he was at that moment. And just then Nella-Rose appeared coming down the
rain-drenched path like a little ghost in the grim, gray dawn.
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