pushed on without regarding
him.

The hut stood on the edge of a sand-bank that was kept up by a large
pine, whose roots and fibres, lying partly bare, looked like some giant
spider that had half buried himself in the sand. On the right of the hut
was a patch of broken ground, in which were still standing a few
straggling dried stalks of Indian corn; and from two dead trees hung
knotted pieces of broken line, which had formerly served for a
clothesline. The hut was built of half-trimmed trunks of trees laid on
each other, crossing at the four corners and running out at unequal
lengths, the chinks partly filled in with sods and moss. The door, which
lay on the floor, was of twisted boughs; and the roof, of the same, was
caved in, and but partly kept out the sun and rain.

As Paul drew near the entrance he stopped, though the wind just then
came in a heavy gust, and the rain fell like a flood. It was not a dread
of what he might see within; but it seemed to him that there was a spell
round him, drawing him nearer and nearer to its centre; and he felt the
hand of some invisible power upon him. As he stepped into the hut a
chill ran over him, and his eyes shut involuntarily. Abel watched him
eagerly; and as he saw him enter, tossed his arms wildly shouting,
"Gone, gone! They'll have me too--they're coming, they're coming!" and
threw himself on his face to the ground.

Driven from home by his maddening passions, a perverse delight in
self-torture had taken possession of Paul; and his mind so hungered for
more intense excitement, that it craved to prove true all which its
jealousy and superstition had imaged. He had walked on, lost in this
fearful riot, but with no particular object in view, and taking only a
kind of crazed joy in his bewildered state. Esther's love for him, which
he at times thought past doubt feigned, the darkness of the night, and
then the driving storm with its confused motions and sounds, made an
uproar of the mind which drove out all settled purpose or thought.

The stillness of the place into which he had now entered, where was
heard nothing but the slow, regular dripping of the rain from the broken
roof upon the hard-trod floor; the lowered and distant sound of the
storm without; the sudden change from the whirl and swaying of the
trees to the steady walls of the building, put a sudden stop to the
violent working of his brain, and he gradually fell into a stupor.

When Abel began to recover, he