hung for a time out of the carriage with the door open, contemplating
a leap from the train. It was to be a dramatic leap, and then I
would go storming back to her, denounce her, overwhelm her; and I
hung, urging myself to do it. I don't remember how it was I decided
not to do this, at last, but in the end I didn't.

When the train stopped at the next station I had given up all
thoughts of going back. I was sitting in the corner of the carriage
with my bruised and wounded hand pressed under my arm, and still
insensible to its pain, trying to think out clearly a scheme of
action--action that should express the monstrous indignation that
possessed me.

CHAPTER THE THIRD

THE REVOLVER

Section 1

"THAT comet is going to hit the earth!"

So said one of the two men who got into the train and settled down.

"Ah!" said the other man.

"They do say that it is made of gas, that comet. We sha'n't
blow up, shall us?". . .

What did it matter to me?

I was thinking of revenge--revenge against the primary conditions
of my being. I was thinking of Nettie and her lover. I was firmly
resolved he should not have her--though I had to kill them both to
prevent it. I did not care what else might happen, if only that end
was ensured. All my thwarted passions had turned to rage. I would
have accepted eternal torment that night without a second thought,
to be certain of revenge. A hundred possibilities of action, a
hundred stormy situations, a whirl of violent schemes, chased one
another through my shamed, exasperated mind. The sole prospect I
could endure was of some gigantic, inexorably cruel vindication of
my humiliated self.

And Nettie? I loved Nettie still, but now with the intensest
jealousy, with the keen, unmeasuring hatred of wounded pride, and
baffled, passionate desire.

Section 2

As I came down the hill from Clayton Crest--for my shilling and
a penny only permitted my traveling by train as far as Two-Mile
Stone, and thence I had to walk over the hill--I remember very
vividly a little man with a shrill voice who was preaching under
a gas-lamp against a hoarding to a thin crowd of Sunday evening
loafers. He was a short man, bald, with a little fair curly beard
and hair and watery blue eyes, and he was preaching that the end
of the world drew near.

I think that is the first time I heard any one link the comet with
the end of the world. He had got that jumbled up with international
politics and