Instinctively he returned to the point whence
they had emerged when they left the woods, and the thought of the
screaming brute came to him with a sense of relief. Here was an object
upon which he could wreak himself, and in a half frenzy of madness he
hurried towards a spot in the edge of the Slashing, towards which
the cowardly thing had run when it fled from his onset. He paused
to listen upon the margin of that tangled wilderness of young trees,
briers, and decaying trunks. How solemn and quiet, wild and lonely it
was, in the deep night and deeper woods! The solemn hush fell upon
the bruised spirit of the youth with the quieting touch and awe of a
palpable presence, rebukingly, yet tenderly and pityingly.

Quick to compassionate others, he had ever been relentless to himself,
and refused to regard himself as an object of injustice, or as needing
compassion. As he stood for a moment confronting himself, scorned,
despised and humiliated, he felt for himself the measureless contempt
to which he seemed to have fallen; yet, under it all, and against it
all, he arose. "Oh, Bart! Bart! what a poor, abject, grovelling
thing you really are," he said bitterly, "when the word of a girl
so overcomes you! when the slap of her little hand so benumbs and
paralyzes you! If you can't put her haunting face from you now, God
can hardly help you. How grand she was, in her rage and scorn! Let me
always see her thus!" and he turned back into the old road. Along
this he sauntered until his eye met the dull gleam of his rifle-barrel
against the old stump where he left it. With a great start, he
exclaimed, "Oh, if I could only go back to the moment when I stood
here with power to choose, and dream!" It was a momentary weakness, a
mere recoil from the wound still so fresh and ragged.

It was still in early evening, with time and life heavy on his hands,
when he remembered that the Doctor had sent him word to come to the
pond that night. Taking his rifle by the muzzle, and throwing it
across his shoulder, he plunged into the woods in a right line for the
west shore of the pond, at about its midway.

Through thick woods tangled with underbrush and laced with wild
vines, down steep banks, over high hills and rocky precipices, across
clearings and hairy brier patches, he took his way, and found relief
in the physical exertions of which he was still capable. At last he
stood on the margin of the forest and hill-embosomed waters of that
lovely