The Valley of the Squinting Windows

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1919 edition. Excerpt: ... XXXII WHEN he came out upon the valley road he was no longer the admirable young man he had been less than a year since. He was a broken thing, and he was stained by another's blood. He was marked eternally by what he had done, and there was upon him a degradation unspeakable. He was an offense against existence and against the gathering, blessed gloom of the quiet evening. ... He had murdererd one who had been his friend, and it was a thing he might never be able to forget. The body, with all the lovely life so recently gone from it, he had weighted and sunk beneath the surface of the lake. ... It was down there now, a poor, dead thing among the ooze of dead things from which the water had taken its color and quality. The wild spirit that had been Ulick Shannon, so contradictory in its many aspects, was now soaring lightly aloft upon the wings of clean winds and he, John Brennan, who had effected this grand release, felt the weights still heavy about his heart. . He came on a group of children playing by the roadside. It seemed as if they had been driven across his path to thwart him with their innocence. He instantly remembered that other evening when he had been pained to hear them express the ugly, uncharitable notions of their parents regarding a child of another religion. Now they were playing merrily as God had intended them to play, and religion, with its tyranny of compulsion towards thoughts of death and sin, seemed distant from them, and distant was it from him too. His mind was empty of any thought. Would no kindly piece of imagination come down to cool his spirit with its grace or lift from his heart the oppression of the leaden weights he had bound about the body of Ulick Shannon? . . . At last he had remembrance of his...