relatives, her acquiescence to his frequent absences; not an
incident, not a characteristic of her married life was inconsistent with
her guilt and her deceit. He went even back to her maidenhood: how did
he know this was not the legitimate sequence of other secret schoolgirl
escapades. The bitter worldly light that had been forced upon his simple
ingenuous nature had dazzled and blinded him. He passed from fatuous
credulity to equally fatuous distrust.

He stopped suddenly with the roaring of water before him. In the furious
following of his rapid thought through storm and darkness he had come,
he knew not how, upon the bank of the swollen river, whose endangered
bridge Demorest had turned from that evening. A few steps more and he
would have fallen into it. He drew nearer and looked at it with vague
curiosity. Had he come there with any definite intention? The thought
sobered without frightening him. There was always THAT culmination
possible, and to be considered coolly.

He turned and began to retrace his steps. On his way thither he had been
fighting the elements step by step; now they seemed to him to have taken
possession of him and were hurrying him quickly away. But where? and to
what? He was always thinking of the past. He had wandered he knew not
how long, always thinking of that. It was the future he had to consider.
What was to be done?

He had heard of such cases before; he had read of them in newspapers
and talked of them with cold curiosity. But they were of worldly, sinful
people, of dissolute men whose characters he could not conceive--of
silly, vain, frivolous, and abandoned women whom he had never even met.
But Joan--O God! It was the first time since his mute prayer on the
staircase that the Divine name had been wrested from his lips. It came
with his wife's--and his first tears! But the wind swept the one away
and dried the others upon his hot cheeks.

It had ceased to rain, and the wind, which was still high, had shifted
more to the north and was bitterly cold. He could feel the roadway
stiffening under his feet. When he reached the pavement of the outskirts
once more he was obliged to take the middle of the street, to avoid the
treacherous films of ice that were beginning to glaze the sidewalks. Yet
this very inclemency, added to the usual Sabbath seclusion, had left the
streets deserted. He was obliged to proceed more slowly, but he met no
one and could pursue his bewildering thoughts uncheck