was--a gentleman."

And the old housekeeper found this strong man, who had never wept in
his life, crying over the old dead setter on the rug.

And the same feeling, the second sight--the presentiment--the
terrible balking of his mind that had always seen so clearly, ever
into the future, held him as in a vise all the morning and moved him
in a strange mysterious way to go to the church and see the woman he
had loved all his life, the being whose very look uplifted him, and
whose smile could make him a hero or a martyr, married to the man who
came home to take her, and half of his all.

Numbed, hardened, speechless, and yet with that terrible presentiment
of the abyss before him, he had stood and seen Alice Westmore made
the wife of another.

He remembered first how quickly he had caught the text of the old
man; indeed, it seemed to him now that everything he heard struck
into him like a brand of fire--for never had life appeared to him as
it did to-day.

"_For the hand of God hath touched me--_" he kept repeating over and
over--repeating and then cursing himself for repeating it--for
remembering it.

And still it stayed there all day--the unbidden ghost-guest of his
soul.

And everything the old preacher said went searing into his quivering
soul, and all the time he kept looking--looking at the woman he loved
and seeing her giving her love, her life, with a happy smile, to
another. And all the time he stood wondering why he came to see it,
why he felt as he did, why things hurt him that way, why he acted so
weakly, why his conscience had awakened at last, why life hurt him
so--life that he had played with as an edged tool--why he could not
get away from himself and his memory, but ran always into it, and why
at last with a shudder, why did nothing seem to be beyond the wall?

He saw her go off, the wife of another. He saw their
happiness--unconscious even that he lived, and he cursed himself and
kept saying: "_The hand of God hath touched me._"

Then he laughed at himself for being silly.

He rode home, but it was not home. Nothing was itself--not even he.
In the watches of one night his life had been changed and the light
had gone out.

When night came it was worse. He mounted his horse and rode--where?
And he could no more help it than he could cease to breathe.

He did not guide the saddle mare, she went herself through wood
sombre and dark with shadows, through cedar trees, dwarfed, and
making pu