dy. The fear plucked at his throat. He
rose and walked unsteadily to the door and out upon the porch.

The evening drew its gauze over the valley, the shrill, tenuous chorus of
insects had begun for the night, the gold caps were dissolving from the
eastern peaks. He saw Simeon Caley at the stable door; Sim avoided him,
moving behind a corner of the shed. His pending sense of blood-guiltiness
deepened. The impulse returned to flee, to vanish in the engulfing wild of
the mountains. But he realized vaguely that that from which he longed to
escape lay within him, he would carry it--the memories woven inexplicably
of past and present, dominated by this last, unforgettable specter on the
bed--into the woods, the high, lonely clearings, the still valleys. It was
not remorse now, it was not simple fear, but the old oppression, increased
a thousand-fold.

He sat in the low rocking chair that had held his mother and Clare, and,
only yesterday, Lettice, and its rockers made their familiar tracking
sound over the uneven boards of the porch. At this hour there was usually
a stir and smell of cooking from the kitchen; but now the kitchen window
was blank and still. Darkness gathered slowly about him; it obscured the
black and white check, the red thread, of his suit; it flowed in about him
and reduced him to the common greyness of the porch, the sod, the stream.
It changed him from a man with a puzzled, seamed visage into a man with no
especial, perceptible features, and then into a shadow, an inconsequential
blur less important than the supports for the wooden covering above.

XXI

After a while he rose, impelled once more within. A lamp had been lit in
the bedroom, and, in its radiance, the countenance on the pillow glistened
like the skin of a lemon. As before, Mrs. Caley left the room as he
entered; and he thought that, as she passed him, she snarled like an
animal.

He sat bowed by the bed. A moth perished in the flame of the lamp, and the
light flickered through the room--it seemed that Lettice grimaced, but it
was only the other. Her face had grown sharper: it was such a travesty of
her that, somehow, he ceased to associate it with Lettice at all. Instead
he began to think of it as something exclusively of his own making--it was
what he had done with things, with life.

The sheet lay over the motionless body like a thin covering of snow on the
turnings of the earth; it defined her breasts and a hip as crisply as