s' house; he watched the
extinguishing of the lights in window after window, and, when all were
gone, made away with curses on his lips, only to return an hour later,
to torture himself with conjecture which room might be Emily's. His
sufferings were unutterable. What devil--he groaned--had sent upon him
this torment? He wished he were as in former days, when the indifference
he felt towards his wife's undeniable beauty had, as it seemed, involved
all womankind. In those times he could not have conceived a madness such
as this. How had it arisen? Was it a physical illness? Was it madness in
truth, or the beginning of it? Why had it not taken him four months ago,
when he met this girl at the Baxendales'? But he remembered that even
then she had attracted him strangely; he had quitted the others to talk
to her. He must have been prepared to conceive this frantic passion on
coming together with her again.

Love alone, so felt and so frustrated, would have been bad enough; it
was the added pang of jealousy that made it a fierce agony. It was well
that the man she had chosen was not within his reach; his mood was that
of a murderer. The very heat and vigour of his physical frame, the
native violence of his temper, disposed him to brute fury, if an
instinct such as this once became acute; and the imaginative energy
which lurked in him, a sort of undeveloped genius, was another source of
suffering beyond that which ordinary men endure. He was a fine creature
in these hours, colossal, tragic; it needed this experience to bring out
all there was of great and exceptional in his character. He was not of
those who can quit the scene of their fruitless misery and find
forgetfulness at a distance. Every searing stroke drove him more
desperately in pursuit of his end. He was further from abandoning it,
now that he knew another stood in his way, than he would have been if
Emily had merely rejected him. He would not yield her to another man; he
swore to himself that he would not, let it cost him and her what it
might.

He had seen her again, with his glass, from the windows of the mill, had
scarcely moved his eyes from her for an hour. A hope came to him that
she might by chance walk at evening on the Heath, but he was
disappointed; Emily, indeed, had long shunned walks in that direction.
He had no other means of meeting her, yet he anguished for a moment's
glimpse of her face.

To-day he knew a cruel assuagement of his torture. He h