re, he
crossed the road to the mill, and stopping beside the motionless wheel,
watched the excited swallows fly back and forth overhead. He knew how a
man felt who was given a life sentence in prison for an act committed in
a moment of madness. Why he had ever asked Judy to marry him--why he
had gone on calmly approaching the day of his wedding--he could no more
explain than he could explain the motives which impelled him to the
absurdities in a nightmare. It was all a part of the terrible and yet
useful perversity of life--of the perversity that enables a human being
to pass from inconsistency to inconsistency without pausing in his
course to reflect on his folly.

In front of him was the vivid green rise in the meadow, which showed
like a burst of spring in the midst of the November landscape. Beyond
it, the pines were etched in sharp outlines on the bright blue sky,
where a buzzard was sailing slowly in search of food. The weather was so
perfect that the colours of the fields and the sky borrowed the intense
and unreal look of objects seen in a crystal.

"Well, it's over and done," said Abel to himself; "it's over and done
and I'm glad of it." It seemed to him while he spoke that it was his
life, not his marriage, to which he alluded--that he had taken the
final, the irremediable step, and there was nothing to come afterwards.
The uncertainty and the suspense were at an end, for the clanging of the
prison doors behind him was still in his ears. To-morrow would be
like yesterday, the next year would be like the last. Forgetting his
political ambition, he told himself passionately that there was nothing
ahead of him--nothing to look forward to. Vaguely he realized that
inconsistent and irreconcilable as his actions appeared, they had been,
in fact, held together by a single, connecting thread, that one dominant
feeling had inspired all of his motives. If he had never loved Molly,
he saw clearly now, he should never have rushed into his marriage with
Judy. Pity had driven him first in the direction of love--he remembered
the pang that had racked his heart at the story of the forsaken
Janet--and pity again had urged him to the supreme folly of his
marriage. All his life he had been led astray by a temptation for drink.

"Poor Judy," he said aloud after a minute, "she deserves to be happy and
I'm going to try with all the strength that is in me to make her so."

And then there rose before him, as if it moved in answer