m savagely--stirred his stagnated blood into action,
and beat thought once more into his brain. He had mechanically turned
towards his own home; his first effort of recovering will hurried
him furiously past it and into a side street. He walked rapidly, but
undeviatingly on to escape observation and secure some solitude for his
returning thoughts. Almost before he knew it he was in the open fields.

The idea of vengeance had never crossed his mind. He was neither a
physical nor a moral coward, but he had never felt the merely animal
fury of disputed animal possession which the world has chosen to
recognize as a proof of outraged sentiment, nor had North Liberty
accepted the ethics that an exchange of shots equalized a transferred
affection. His love had been too pure and too real to be moved like
the beasts of the field, to seek in one brutal passion compensation for
another. Killing--what was there to kill? All that he had to live for
had been already slain. With the love that was in him--in them--already
dead at his feet, what was it to him whether these two hollow lives
moved on and passed him, or mingled their emptiness elsewhere? Only let
them henceforth keep out of his way!

For in his first feverish flow of thought--the reaction to his benumbed
will within and the beating sleet without--he believed Demorest as
treacherous as his wife. He recalled his sudden and unexpected intrusion
into the buggy only a few hours before, his mysterious confidences, his
assurance of Joan's favorable reception of his secret, and her consent
to the Californian trip. What had all this meant if not that Demorest
was using him, the husband, to assist his intrigue, and carry the news
of his presence in the town to her? And this boldness, this assurance,
this audacity of conception was like Demorest! While only certain
passages of the guilty meeting he had just seen and overheard were
distinctly impressed on his mind, he remembered now, with hideous
and terrible clearness, all that had gone before. It was part of the
disturbed and unequal exaltation of his faculties that he dwelt more
upon this and his wife's previous deceit and manifest hypocrisy, than
upon the actual evidence he had witnessed of her unfaithfulness. The
corroboration of the fact was stronger to him than the fact itself. He
understood the coldness, the uncongeniality now--the simulated increase
of her aversion to Demorest--her journeys to Boston and Hartford to
see her