e
leak, as like one out of which every nail had been pulled and the joints
left open to the inrushing waters.

Into the unfilled gap in his mother's narrative, ten thousand suspicions
crept, each displacing the other and leaving him more and more in
darkness and in dread with regard to the origin of his own life.
Wherever he went and whatever he did these confused suspicions resounded
in his ears like the murmur in a seashell.

He did not dare communicate this story even to his sister; for if she
knew nothing he feared to poison her existence by telling her, and if
she knew all he had not the courage to listen to the sequel. Perhaps no
other experience in life produces a more profound shock than a discovery
like that upon which David had so suddenly stumbled. It leads to despair
or to melancholy, and many a life of highest promise has been suddenly
wrecked by it. While he brooded over this mystery the days slipped past
the young mystic almost unnoted; he wandered about the farm, passing
from one fit of abstraction into another, doing nothing, saying nothing,
thinking everything.

The world was shrouded in a gloom through whose shifting mists a single
star shone now and then, emitting a brilliant and dazzling ray. It was
the figure of a gypsy.

In his heavy, aching heart thoughts of her alone aroused an emotion of
joy. As other objects lost their power to attract or charm, she more and
more filled all his horizon.

Her name was whispered by each passing breeze. It was syllabled by every
singing bird. The old clock ticked it on the stairway. The hoofs of his
horse which he rode recklessly over the country uttered it to the hard
roads on which they fell--"Pepeeta, Pepeeta, Pepeeta."

Whenever he really tried to banish the temptations which haunted his
soul, they always returned to the swept and garnished chamber bringing
with them seven spirits worse than themselves.

He tried to look forward to the future with hope. But how can a man hope
for harvests, when all his seed corn has been destroyed? If his father
was bad, what hope was there that he could be better?

He made innumerable resolves to take up the duties of life where he had
laid them down, but they were all like birds which die in the nest where
they are born.

Pepeeta was drawing him irresistibly to herself; he was like a man in
the outer circle of a vortex, of which she was the center. The touch of
her soft hand which he could still feel, the farewel