it over the wrong shoulder at the wrong time.

Be that as it may, I hated John Claverhouse. Not that he had done me
what society would consider a wrong or an ill turn. Far from it. The
evil was of a deeper, subtler sort; so elusive, so intangible, as
to defy clear, definite analysis in words. We all experience such
things at some period in our lives. For the first time we see a
certain individual, one who the very instant before we did not dream
existed; and yet, at the first moment of meeting, we say: "I do not
like that man." Why do we not like him? Ah, we do not know why; we
know only that we do not. We have taken a dislike, that is all. And
so I with John Claverhouse.

What right had such a man to be happy? Yet he was an optimist. He
was always gleeful and laughing. All things were always all right,
curse him! Ah I how it grated on my soul that he should be so happy!
Other men could laugh, and it did not bother me. I even used to
laugh myself--before I met John Claverhouse.

But his laugh! It irritated me, maddened me, as nothing else under
the sun could irritate or madden me. It haunted me, gripped hold of
me, and would not let me go. It was a huge, Gargantuan laugh. Waking
or sleeping it was always with me, whirring and jarring across my
heart-strings like an enormous rasp. At break of day it came
whooping across the fields to spoil my pleasant morning revery.
Under the aching noonday glare, when the green things drooped and
the birds withdrew to the depths of the forest, and all nature
drowsed, his great "Ha! ha!" and "Ho! ho!" rose up to the sky and
challenged the sun. And at black midnight, from the lonely
cross-roads where he turned from town into his own place, came his