He finished undressing quietly.  Before he turned in he placed a hand on his head.  It was hot, feverish.  This was not unusual, and it did not alarm him.  Quite often of late these hot and feverish spells had come upon him, nearly always at night.  Usually they were followed the next day by a terrific headache.  More and more frequently they had been warning him how nearly down and out he was, and he knew what to expect.  He put out his light and stretched himself between the warm blankets of his bed, knowing that he was about to begin again the fight he dreaded—­the struggle that always came at night with the demon that lived within him, the demon that was feeding on his life as a leech feeds on blood, the demon that was killing him inch by inch.  Nerves altogether unstrung!  Nerves frayed and broken until they were bleeding!  Worry—­emptiness of heart and soul—­a world turned black!  And all because of her—­the golden goddess who had laughed at him in her room, whose laughter would never die out of his ears.  He gritted his teeth; his hands clenched under his blankets; a surge of anger swept through him—­for an instant it was almost hatred.  Was it possible that she—­that woman who had been his wife—­could chain him now, enslave his thoughts, fill his mind, his brain, his body, after what had happened? Why was it that he could not rise up and laugh and shrug his shoulders, and thank God that, after all, there had been no children?  Why couldn’t he do that? Why?  Why?

A long time afterward he seemed to be asking that question.  He seemed to be crying it out aloud, over and over again, in a strange and mysterious wilderness; and at last he seemed to be very near to a girl who was standing on a rock waiting for him; a girl who bent toward him like a wonderful flower, her arms reaching out, her lips parted, her eyes shining through the glory of her windswept hair as she listened to his cry of “Why?  Why?”

He slept.  It was a deep, cool sleep; a slumber beside a shadowed pool, with the wind whispering gently in strange tree tops, and water rippling softly in a strange stream.

CHAPTER VI

Sunshine followed storm.  The winter sun was cresting the tree tops when Thoreau got out of his bed to build a fire in the big stove.  It was nine o’clock, and bitterly cold.  The frost lay thick upon the windows, with the sun staining it like the silver and gold of old cathedral glass, and as the fox breeder opened the cabin door to look at his thermometer he heard the snap and crack of that cold in the trees outside, and in the timbers of the log walls.  He always looked at the thermometer before he built his fire—­a fixed habit in him; he wanted to know, first of all, whether it had been a good night for his foxes, and whether it had been too cold for the furred creatures of the forest to travel.  Fifty degrees below zero was bad for fisher and marten and lynx; on such nights they preferred the warmth of snug holes and deep windfalls to full stomachs, and his traps were usually empty.  This morning it was forty-seven degrees below zero.  Cold enough!  He turned, closed the door, shivered.  Then he stopped halfway to the stove, and stared.