ceived it like the slave who has been beaten so
many times that he no longer cries out or strikes back prematurely.
Like the tortured bond-man who makes no useless protest but hides in
his bosom the knife which one day he will plunge into his master's
throat, Drennen merely bided his time.

He saw no good in a world which had had no good to offer him. He no
longer looked for the light. New shoots of faith, bursting upward
under Ygerne's influence from the dry roots of the old, were in an
instant shrivelled and killed. He came to see that in an old world
there was no basic law but that law which had held from the first day
in the new world. There was no good; bad was only a term coined for
fools by other fools. Each man had his life given to him, and he could
do with it as he saw fit. Each wild thing in the depths of the North
Woods had its life given to it to do with as it saw fit. Each created
being, were it not maudlin, strove for itself alone. It took its own
food where it could get it, rending it with bared teeth and bloody jaws
from the weaker creature that had preyed upon a still weaker. It made
its lair where it chose, crushing under its careless body those other
still lesser things which had not sense enough or the opportunity to
slip out from under it. Love, as man looked upon it or pretended to
look upon it, was no real emotion but a poetical illusion. Nor was it
so much as truly poetical, since poetry is truth and this thing was a
lie. There was no love but the old, primal love of life, a blind,
unreasoning instinct. He did not love Ygerne; he had never loved
Ygerne because, in the nature of nature, there could be no such thing
as such a love.

But hatred was another matter. That was nature. A man, with all of
his bluster, cannot get away from nature. Don't the winters freeze and
kill him? Doesn't water drown him, fire burn him? Love had no place
in nature; hatred was a part of the one law, the primal law. The wolf
kills the rabbit in hot rage; the black ant tears down the soft-bodied
caterpillar not so much in hunger as in wrath.

The lower order of created beings seemed to Drennen to be the truly
higher order. For they did not philosophise; they killed their prey.
They did not reason and thus follow a blind goddess; they moved as
their swift instincts dictated and made no mistake. Now he did not
need to bolster up his purpose with seeking to wander through the
thousand lanes of reaso