r.
Royal's house and walking quickly down the street, he had met the
bridegroom himself, and had returned Archdale's bow with a politeness
equally cold, while anger had leaped up within him. Was Archdale going
to call upon his wife?

Stephen Archdale had come to Boston to collect whatever facts he could
about Harwin, and about the places and the people that the confession
referred to. Nothing was farther from his thoughts than any such visit.
It was his wish that Elizabeth and himself need never meet again, and he
knew that it was hers. Indeed, so far from thinking of the woman who was
perhaps his wife, he was living over again the glimpse he had had of the
one from whom he had been separated. Three days ago he had taken his gun
early in the morning and had gone out hunting, made more miserable than
before by something he had perceived in his father's mind. The Colonel
was not in sympathy with him; he was consoling himself that, after all,
Elizabeth Royal was a richer woman than Katie Archdale. At his light
insinuation of this to his son, the young man had flamed out into a heat
of passion and declared that one golden hair of Katie's head was worth
both Elizabeth and her fortune. He had rushed out of the house with the
wish for destroying something in his mind. As he stopped in the hall to
snatch his gun, the flintlock caught, and tore a hole in the tapestry
hanging. He saw it, pushed the great stag's antlers that the gun had
been swung on a little aside, and covered the torn place. Then he forgot
the accident almost as soon as this was done, left the house and went
striding over the fields, not so much to chase the foxes, as to be
alone. And when that point was gained he would have gone a step further
if he could and escaped from himself also. But he was only all the more
with his own thoughts as he wandered aimlessly through great stretches
of pine trees with the light snow of the night before still white on
their lower boughs, except when in some opening it had melted into
dewdrops in the December sun, and still clung to the trees, ready when
the sun had passed by them towards its setting to turn into filmy
icicles. The sky was brilliant; the long winter already upon the earth
smiled gently, as if to say that its reign would be mild. Stephen went
along so much preoccupied that only the baying of his hound made him
notice the light fox-prints by the roadside. Then the instinct of the
hunter stirred within him, and he