him, his mind cleared as he walked to the
edge of the wood and stared at the old house, which now in the mist of
morning had the fixed, still, reproachful look of the dead. As if a
spirit had leaped upon him, memory brought back his personality and his
grief together. Men told afterwards, early laborers in the fields, of a
cry from the Endicott woods, so strange and woful that their hearts beat
fast and their frightened ears strained for its repetition. Sonia heard
it in her adulterous dreams. It was not repeated. The very horror of it
terrified the man who uttered it. He stood by a tree trembling, for a
double terror fell upon him, terror of her no less than of himself. He
staggered through the woods, and sought far-away places in the hills,
where none might see him. When the sun drifted in through dark boughs he
cursed it, the emblem of joy. The singing of the birds sounded to his
ears like the shriek of madmen. When he could think and reason somewhat,
he called up the vision of Sonia to wonder over it. The childlike eyes,
the beautiful, lovable face, the modest glance, the innocent
blushes--had nature such masks for her vilest offspring? The mere animal
senses should have recognized at the first this deadly thing, as animals
recognize their foes; and he had lived with the viper, believing her the
peer of his spotless mother. She was his wife! Even at that moment the
passionate love of yesterday stirred in his veins and moved him to
deeper horror.

He doubted that he was Horace Endicott. Every one knew that boy to be
the sanest of young men, husband to the loveliest of women, a happy,
careless, wealthy fellow, almost beside himself with the joy of life.
The madman who ran about the desolate wilds uttering strange and
terrible things, who was wrapped within and without in torments of
flame, who refrained from crime and death only because vengeance would
thus be cheaply satisfied, could hardly be the boy of yesterday. Was sin
such a magician that in a day it could evolve out of merry Horace and
innocent Sonia two such wretches? The wretch Sonia had proved her
capacity for evil; the wretch Horace felt his capabilities for crime and
rejoiced in them. He must live to punish. A sudden fear came upon him
that his grief and rage might bring death or madness, and leave him
incapable of vengeance. _They_ would wish nothing better. No, he must
live, and think rationally, and not give way. But the mind worked on in
spite of the