CHAPTER IV.

POSSESSION.

Jacques De Arthenay went home that night like a man possessed. He was
furious with himself, with the strange woman who had thus set his sober
thoughts in a whirl, with the very children in the street who had
laughed and danced and encouraged her in her sinful music, to her own
peril and theirs. He thought it was only anger that so held his mind;
yet once in his house, seated on the little stool before his fire, he
found himself still in the street, still looking down into that lovely
childish face that lifted itself so innocently to his, still smitten to
the heart by the beauty of it, and by the fear that he saw in it of his
own stern aspect. He had never looked upon any woman before. He had
been proud of it,--proud of his strength and cleverness, that needed no
meddlesome female creature coming in between him and his business,
between him and his religion. He had not let his hair and beard grow,
knowing nothing of such practices, but in heart he had been a Nazarite
from his youth up,--serving God in his harsh, unloving way; loving God,
as he thought; certainly loving nothing else, if it were not the dumb
creatures, to whom he was always kind and just. And now--what had
happened to him? He asked himself the question sternly, sitting there
before the cheerful blaze, yet neither seeing nor feeling it. The
answer seemed to cry itself in his ears, to write itself before his
eyes in letters of fire. The thing had happened that happens in the
story books, that really comes to pass once in a hundred years, they
say. He had seen the one woman in the world that he wanted for his
own, to have and to hold, to love and to cherish. She was a stranger,
a vagabond, trading in iniquity, and gaining her bread by the
corruption of souls of men and children; and he loved her, he longed
for her, and the world meant nothing to him henceforth unless he could
have her. He put the thought away from him like a snake, but it came
back and curled round his heart, and made him cold and then hot and
then cold again. Was he not a professing Christian, bound by the
strictest ties? Yes! How she looked, standing there with the children
about her, the little slender figure swaying to and fro to the music,
the pretty head bent down so lovingly, the dark eyes looking here and
there, bright and shy, like those of a wild creature so gentle in its
nature that it knew no fear. But he had taught her fear! ye