g more.

He advanced a few steps into the garden without knowing why--stopped,
glancing hither and thither like a man lost--recognized the summer-house
by an effort, as if years had elapsed since he had seen it--and made his
way out again, at last, into the park. Even here, he wandered first in
one direction, then in another. His mind was still reeling under
the shock that had fallen on it; his perceptions were all confused.
Something kept him mechanically in action, walking eagerly without a
motive, walking he knew not where.

A far less sensitively organized man might have been overwhelmed, as
he was overwhelmed now, by the immense, the instantaneous revulsion of
feeling which the event of the last few minutes had wrought in his mind.

At the memorable instant when he had opened the door of the
summer-house, no confusing influence troubled his faculties. In all that
related to his position toward his friend, he had reached an absolutely
definite conclusion by an absolutely definite process of thought. The
whole strength of the motive which had driven him into the resolution
to part from Allan rooted itself in the belief that he had seen at Hurle
Mere the fatal fulfillment of the first Vision of the Dream. And this
belief, in its turn, rested, necessarily, on the conviction that the
woman who was the one survivor of the tragedy in Madeira must be also
inevitably the woman whom he had seen standing in the Shadow's place at
the pool. Firm in that persuasion, he had himself compared the object of
his distrust and of the rector's distrust with the description written
by the rector himself--a description, carefully minute, by a man
entirely trustworthy--and his own eyes had informed him that the
woman whom he had seen at the Mere, and the woman whom Mr. Brock had
identified in London, were not one, but Two. In the place of the Dream
Shadow, there had stood, on the evidence of the rector's letter, not the
instrument of the Fatality--but a stranger!

No such doubts as might have troubled a less superstitious man, were
started in _his_ mind by the discovery that had now opened on him.

It never occurred to him to ask himself whether a stranger might not
be the appointed instrument of the Fatality, now when the letter had
persuaded him that a stranger had been revealed as the figure in the
dream landscape. No such idea entered or could enter his mind. The one
woman whom _his_ superstition dreaded was the woman who had entwi