the idea of
concrete compensation, in a word--shaped itself sooner or later into the
image of Mary Garland.

Very odd, you may say, that at this time of day Rowland should still
be brooding over a plain girl of whom he had had but the lightest of
glimpses two years before; very odd that so deep an impression should
have been made by so lightly-pressed an instrument. We must admit the
oddity and offer simply in explanation that his sentiment apparently
belonged to that species of emotion of which, by the testimony of the
poets, the very name and essence is oddity. One night he slept but
half an hour; he found his thoughts taking a turn which excited him
portentously. He walked up and down his room half the night. It looked
out on the Arno; the noise of the river came in at the open window; he
felt like dressing and going down into the streets. Toward morning
he flung himself into a chair; though he was wide awake he was less
excited. It seemed to him that he saw his idea from the outside, that he
judged it and condemned it; yet it stood there before him, distinct,
and in a certain way imperious. During the day he tried to banish it
and forget it; but it fascinated, haunted, at moments frightened him. He
tried to amuse himself, paid visits, resorted to several rather violent
devices for diverting his thoughts. If on the morrow he had committed a
crime, the persons whom he had seen that day would have testified
that he had talked strangely and had not seemed like himself. He felt
certainly very unlike himself; long afterwards, in retrospect, he used
to reflect that during those days he had for a while been literally
beside himself. His idea persisted; it clung to him like a sturdy
beggar. The sense of the matter, roughly expressed, was this: If
Roderick was really going, as he himself had phrased it, to "fizzle
out," one might help him on the way--one might smooth the descensus
Averno. For forty-eight hours there swam before Rowland's eyes a vision
of Roderick, graceful and beautiful as he passed, plunging, like a
diver, from an eminence into a misty gulf. The gulf was destruction,
annihilation, death; but if death was decreed, why should not the agony
be brief? Beyond this vision there faintly glimmered another, as in the
children's game of the "magic lantern" a picture is superposed on the
white wall before the last one has quite faded. It represented Mary
Garland standing there with eyes in which the horror seemed slowl