in the
darkness; and he did not see Cephas Barnard's threatening
countenance, but another, gigantic with its vague outlines, which his
fancy could not limit, confronting him with terrible negative power
like a stone image. He struck out against it, and the blows fell back
on his own heart.

"What have I done?" he demanded over and over of this great immovable
and silent consciousness which he realized before him. "Have I not
kept all thy commandments from childhood? Have I ever failed to
praise thee as the giver of my happiness, and ask thy blessing upon
it? What have I done that it should be taken away? It was given to me
only to be taken away. Why was it given to me, then?--that I might be
mocked? Oh, I am mocked, I am mocked!" he cried out, in a great rage,
and he struck out in the darkness, and his heart leaped with futile
pain. The possibility that his misery might not be final never
occurred to him. It never occurred to him that he could enter Cephas
Barnard's house again, ask his pardon, and marry Charlotte. It seemed
to him settled and inevitable; he could not grasp any choice in the
matter.

Barnabas finally threw himself back on the pile of shavings, and lay
there sullenly. Great gusts of cold wind came in at the windows at
intervals, a loose board somewhere in the house rattled, the trees
outside murmured heavily.

"There won't be a frost," Barnabas thought, his mind going apace on
its old routine in spite of its turmoil. Then he thought with the
force of an oath that he did not care if there was a frost. All the
trees this spring had blossomed only for him and Charlotte; now there
was no longer any use in that; let the blossoms blast and fall!

Chapter II

Sylvia Crane's house was the one in which her grandmother had been
born, and was the oldest house in the village. It was known as the
"old Crane place." It had never been painted, it was shedding its
flapping gray shingles like gray scales, the roof sagged in a mossy
hollow before the chimney, the windows and doors were awry, and the
whole house was full of undulations and wavering lines, which gave it
a curiously unreal look in broad daylight. In the moonlight it was
the shadowy edifice built of a dream.

As Sylvia and Charlotte came to the front door it seemed as if they
might fairly walk through it as through a gray shadow; but Sylvia
stooped, and her shoulders strained with seemingly incongruous force,
as if she were spending it to roll