lowering his arm; and, holding the
sights hard on the other's metal-buttoned, twill jacket, Howat pulled
the trigger. There was only an answering dull, ineffectual click.

The rifle slid to the ground, and Howat stared, fascinated, at the man
he had attempted to kill. The charcoal burners were stationary before
the momentary abandon of Howat Penny's temper. "Right at me," the man
articulated who had been so nearly shot into oblivion. "--saw the hammer
fall." A tremendous desire to escape possessed Howat; a violent chill
overtook him; his knees threatened the loss of all power to hold him up.
He stepped backward, his gun stock trailing over the inequalities of the
ground; then he swung about, and, in an unbroken silence, stumbled away.

He was not running from anything the charcoal burner might say, do, but
from a terrifying spectacle of himself; from the vision of a body shot
through the breast, huddled in the sere underbrush. He was aghast at the
unsuspected possibility revealed, as it were, out of a profound dark by
the searing flash of his anger, cold at the thought of such absolute
self-betrayal. Howat saw in fancy the bald triumph of a society to which
his act consummated would have delivered him; a society that, as his
peer, would have judged, condemned, him. Hundreds of faces--faces mean,
insignificant, or pock-marked--merged into one huge, dominant
countenance; hundreds of bodies, unwashed or foul with disease, or
meticulously clean, joined in one body, clothed in the black robe of
delegated authority, and loomed above him, gigantic and absurd and
powerful, and brought him to death. Deeper than his horror, than any
fear of physical consequences, lay the instinctive shrinking from the
obliteration of his individual being, the loss of personal freedom.

II

He was possessed by an unaccustomed desire to be at Myrtle Forge;
usually it was the contrary case, and he was escaping from the
complicated civilisation of his home; but now the well-ordered house,
the serenity of his room, appeared astonishingly inviting. Howat
progressed rapidly past the smithy, and turned to the right, about the
Furnace dam, a placid and irregular reach of water holding the
reflection of the trees on a mirror still dulled by a vanishing trace of
mist, above which the leaves hung in the motionless air, in the aureate
wash of the early sun, as if they had been pressed from gold foil.
Beyond the dam the path--he had left the road t