oved him for his strength, his vigour, his gentleness--and she
still loved him.

Of the men that she had known, who was there so ready to assist, so
forgetful of services which he had rendered? There was none so powerful
and yet so kind--so generous or so gentle. An impulse stirred her to
cross the fields to his door and fling herself into the breach that
divided them; but again the phantom in the flames grew dim and then sent
out the face that she had seen that afternoon--convulsed and quivering,
with its flitting sinister likeness to Amos Burr. A voice that seemed to
be the voice of old dead Aunt Griselda--of her whole dead race that had
decayed and been forgotten, and come to life again in her--spoke
suddenly from the silence:

"When all's said and done, a Battle's a Battle."

The resinous pine blazed up, the pungent odour filled the large room,
and from the lightwood sticks tiny streams of resin oozed out and
dripped into the embers, turning the red to gray.

Mingling with the crackling of the flames there was a noise as of the
soughing of the wind in the pine forests.

The hearth grew suddenly blurred before her eyes; and a passion of grief
rose to her throat and clutched her with the grip of claws. For an
instant longer she stood motionless; then, turning from the fire, she
threw herself upon the floor to weep until the daybreak.

VII

When Nicholas left Eugenia it was to stride blindly towards his father's
gate. The rage which had stunned him into silence before the girl now
leaped and crackled like flame in his blood. His throat was parched and
he saw red like a man who kills.

Passing his home, he kept on to Kingsborough, and once within the shadow
of the wood, he broke into a run, flying from himself and from the goad
of his wrath. As he ran, he felt with a kind of alien horror that to
meet Bernard Battle face to face in this hour would be to do
murder--murder too mild for the man who had lied away his friend's
honour for the sake of the whiteness of his own skin. It was the
injustice that he resented with a holy rage--the hideous fact that a
clean man should be spotted to save an unclean one the splashing he
merited.

And Eugenia also--he hated Eugenia that he had kept her image
untarnished in his thoughts; that he had allowed the desire for no other
woman to shadow it. He had held himself as a temple for the worship of
her; he had permitted no breath of defilement to blow upon the
altar--