spirit!--or else not
married at all."

I shut the door; I am afraid I slammed it. I cleared the steps at a
bound, and ran fiercely out into the night air. The wind was rising,
and the weather was growing sharp. It was frosty and noisy. Donna, my
chestnut mare, stood pawing the pavement in high temper, and called to
me as she heard my step. She had dragged at her weight a little; she
was thoroughly displeased with the delay. It occurred to me that she
felt as I had acted. It even occurred to me to go back and tell my
wife that I was ashamed of myself.

I turned and looked in through the parlour windows. The shades were
up, and the gas was low. Dimly beyond, the bright panel of the lighted
library arose between the crimson curtains. She stood against it,
midway between the two rooms. Her hands had dropped closed one into
the other before her. Her face was toward the street. She seemed to
be gazing at me, whom she could not see. Her white dress, which hung
in thick folds, the pallor of her face and her delicate hands, gave her
the look of a statue; its purity, and to my fancy at that moment its
permanence. She seemed to be carved there, like something that must
stay.

I turned to go back--yes, I would have gone. It is little enough for a
man to say for himself under circumstances like these; but perhaps I
may be allowed to say it, since to exculpate myself is the last of my
motives. I had made a stop or two up the flagging between the deep
grass-plots that fronted the house, when the mare, disturbed beyond
endurance at a movement of delay which she too well understood, gave a
shrill whinny, and reared, pulling and dragging at her weight fiercely.
She was a powerful creature, and the weight yielded, hitting at her
heels. In an instant she had cramped the wheels, and I saw that the
buggy would go over. To spring back, reach the bit, snatch the reins,
leap over the wheel, and whirl away in the reeling carriage was the
work of some thing less than a thought; it was the elemental instinct
by which a man must manage his horse, come life or death.

Like most doctors, I was something of a horseman, and the idea of being
thwarted by any of Donna's whims had never occurred to me. I knew that
the horse was pulling hard, but beyond that, I could not be said to
have knowledge, much less fear; the mad conflict between the brute and
the man possessed me to the exclusion of intelligence.

It was some moments befo