ways to do his bidding. He did not
love this woman whose nearness so profoundly disturbed him. Sometimes
he hated her consciously, with a volcanic intensity that made his
fingers itch for a strangling grip upon her white throat. She had
ripped up by the roots his faith in life and love at a time when he
sorely needed that faith, when the sustaining power of some such faith
was his only shield against the daily impact of bloodshed and
suffering and death, of all the nerve-shattering accompaniments of
war.

Yet he suffered from the spur of her nearness, those haunting pictures
of her which he could not bar out of his mind, those revived memories
of alluring tenderness, of her clinging to him with soft arms and
laughter on her lips.

He would stand on the rim of the cliff, looking down at the house by
the river, thinking the unthinkable, attracted and repulsed, a victim
to his imagination and the fever of his flesh, until it seemed to him
sometimes that in the loaded chamber of his rifle lay the only sure
avenue of escape from these vain longings, from unattainable desire.

Slowly a desperate resolution formed within his seething brain,
shadowy at first, recurring again and again with insistent persuasion,
until it no longer frightened him as it did at first, no longer made
him shrink and feel a loathing of himself.

She was his wife. She had ceased to care for him. She had given
herself to another man. No matter, she was still his. Legally, beyond
any shadow of a doubt. The law and the Church had joined them
together. Neither man nor God had put them asunder, and the law had
not released them from their bonds. Then, if he wanted her, why should
he not take her?

Watching the house day after day, hours at a stretch, Hollister
brooded over this new madness. But it no longer seemed to him madness.
It came to seem fit and proper, a matter well within his rights. He
postulated a hypothetical situation; if he, officially dead,
resurrected himself and claimed her, who was there to say him nay if
he demanded and exacted a literal fulfilment of her solemn covenant to
"love, honor, and obey?" She herself? Hollister snapped his fingers.
The man she lived with? Hollister dismissed him with an impatient
gesture.

The purely animal man, which is never wholly extinguished, which
merely lurks unsuspected under centuries of cultural veneer to rise
lustily when slowly acquired moralities shrivel in the crucible of
passion, now beg