The woman had been the plague spot of Lower Carmody and Carmody Harbour
for a generation. In the earlier days of his ministry to the congregation
he had tried to reclaim her, and Naomi had mocked and flouted him
to his face. Then, for the sake of those to whom she was a snare or a
heart-break, he had endeavoured to set the law in motion against her,
and Naomi had laughed the law to scorn. Finally, he had been compelled
to let her alone.
Yet Naomi had not always been an outcast. Her girlhood had been innocent;
but she was the possessor of a dangerous beauty, and her mother was dead.
Her father was a man notorious for his harshness and violence of temper.
When Naomi made the fatal mistake of trusting to a false love that
betrayed and deserted, he drove her from his door with taunts and curses.
Naomi took up her quarters in a little deserted house at
Spruce Cove. Had her child lived it might have saved her.
But it died at birth, and with its little life went her last
chance of worldly redemption. From that time forth, her feet
were set in the way that takes hold on hell.
For the past five years, however, Naomi had lived a tolerably
respectable life. When Janet Peterson had died, her idiot daughter,
Maggie, had been left with no kin in the world.
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