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 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