was scarcely hours old, the rest of it, too,
was tinged with an uncanny unreality that was not far removed from the
bodiless fabric of nightmare itself: Those great, catapulting hoofs
which had thundered against him from the darkness and beaten him back,
a half-senseless heap, against the barn wall; the blind, mad rage, as
much a wildly hysterical abandonment of utter joy as anything else,
which had surged through him when, with the stinging odor of the
overturned jug in his nostrils, he had stooped and straightened and
sent the old stone demijohn, that had stood sentinel for years in the
corner near the door, splintering its way through the window into the
night; and, last of all, the sick horror of the girl's face as she
recoiled before him came vividly before his eyes, and his own strange
impotence of limb and lip when he had tried to follow and found that
his feet would not obey the impulse of his brain, tried to explain
only to find that his tongue somehow refused at that moment to voice
the words he would have spoken.

That was hardest of all to believe--most difficult to visualize--and
he would not give it full credence until he had reached out behind him
in the dark and found the bit of a cloak which, slipping from her
shoulders, become entangled in his stumbling feet and brought him
crashing to his knees. The feel of that rough cloth beneath his hand
was more than enough to convince him, and swiftly, unreasonably, the
old bitter tide of resentment began to creep back upon him--bitter
resentment of her quick judgment of him, which like that of the
village, had condemned in the years that were past, even without a
hearing.

"She thought," he muttered slowly aloud to himself, "she thought I
had--" He left the sentence unfinished to drift off into a long
brooding silence; and then, many minutes later: "She didn't even wait
to ask--to see--to let me tell her----"

One hand went tentatively to the point of his chin--his old, vaguely
preoccupied trick of a gesture--and the wet touch of that open wound
helped to bring him back to himself. A moment longer he sat, trying
to make out the stained figures that were invisible even though he
held them a scant few inches from his eyes, before he rose, stretching
his legs in experimental doubt at first, and passed inside. And once
more he stood before the square patch of mirror on the wall, with the
small black-chimneyed lamp lifted high in one hand, just as he had
stood ea