re dormant. After the sudden volcanic upheaval of his entire
universe, he was utterly absorbed in the immediate task of
reconstructing his faith in himself. The primitive stages of his
thinking did not allow for any relation between himself and the woman
who had released the dam of self-abasement. She was unavoidably at hand,
reminding him of her speech, and that alone delayed what otherwise would
have been an unconscious process.

Claire was not able to forget the intense desire which, she now
realized, had prompted her terrible diatribe. Humiliation held her in
its throes, and she was reserved, distant, and unnatural toward him.

Philip saw it all, and his mind was filled with conjectures which made
him less and less charitable toward Lawrence, more jealous, and more
hopeful of a happy issue of his love for Claire. She turned to him
eagerly for companionship. Instinctively she sought refuge from her own
thoughts--and from Lawrence--by talking to Philip.

The morning after the incident between Lawrence and Claire there had
been an austere reserve in the cabin. Claire had fled from the
oppressive gloom into the open. Outside Philip joined her, and they
walked together in silence. He was determined not to ask Claire what had
happened, although he was extending her a silent sympathy which she felt
and a little resented.

Lawrence, left alone in the cabin, gave small heed to their departure.
He had risen with a frightful headache and a fever. He lay on the bed
and thought of his situation, his past life, and his future chances, in
bitter, heartrending, self-condemnatory sarcasm which made his condition
even less tolerable than it would have been otherwise.

"I am a miserable groveler at the feet of humanity," he thought,
"clutching at shrinking shoestrings for a piece of bread in pity's name.
If I could see, God, if I only could!"

He thought of all the little things which his blindness made it
absolutely necessary for others to do for him, and his excited mind
magnified them into colossal proportions. If his landlady in New York
had removed a spot from his clothes, as she had often done, that was a
proof of his despised state. He fell to imagining that he was unkempt,
dirty, disgustingly unclean, and that people had tolerated it because
they had pitied him. At last, with a cry of anguish, he thought: "And my
work, too, it is a botched mess which they are amused at and do not dare
to tell me the truth about. It, too,