work, and yet the sight of it was at times unbearable to him. There were
times again, however, when it fascinated him anew when he went and stood
opposite to it, regarding it with an intense gaze. He scarcely knew
how the last week had passed. It seemed to have been spent in alternate
feverish struggles and reckless abandonment to impulse. He had let
himself drift here and there, he had at last gone so far as to tell
himself that the time had arrived when baseness was possible to him.

"I don't promise you an easy life," he had said to Dusk the night
before. "I tell you I am a bad fellow, and I have lost something through
you that I cared for. You may wish yourself back again."

"If you leave me," she said, "I'll kill myself!" and she struck her
hands together.

For the moment he was filled, as he often was, with a sense of
passionate admiration. It was true he saw her as no other creature had
ever seen her before, that so far as such a thing was possible with her,
she loved him--loved him with a fierce, unreserved, yet narrow passion.

He had little actual packing to do--merely the collecting of a few
masculine odds and ends, and then his artistic accompaniments.
Nothing was of consequence but these; the rest were tossed together
indifferently, but the picture was to be left until the last moment,
that its paint might be dry beyond a doubt.

Having completed his preparations he went out. He had the day before
him, and scarcely knew what to do with it, but it must be killed in one
way or another. He wandered up the mountain and at last lay down with
his cigar among the laurels. He was full of a strange excitement which
now thrilled, now annoyed him.

He came back in the middle of the afternoon and laughed a rather
half-hearted laugh at the excellent Mandy's comment upon his jaded
appearance.

"Ye look kinder tuckered out," she said. "Ye'd oughtn't ter walked so
fur when ye was a-gwine off to-night. Ye'd orter rested."

She stopped the churn-dasher and regarded him with a good-natured air of
interest.

"Hev ye seed Dusk to say good-by to her?" she added. "She's went over
the mountain ter help Mirandy Stillins with her soap. She wont be back
fur a day or two."

He went into his room and shut the door. A fierce repulsion sickened
him. He had heretofore held himself with a certain degree of inward
loftiness; he had so condemned the follies and sins of other men, and
here he found himself involved in a low and