This he remembered now, clinching his hands until he drove the nails into his palms.

“I have been madder than I thought,” he said.  “Yes, ’twas madness—­but ’twas Nature, too!  Good God!” his forehead dropping in his hand and he panting.  “I feel as if she had been a year my wife, and another man had torn her from my breast.  And yet she has not been mine an hour—­nor ever will be—­and she is Dunstanwolde’s, who, while I wake in torment, dreams in bliss, as is his honest, heavenly right.”  Even to the torment he had no claim, but in being torn by it seemed but robbing another man.  What a night of impotent rage it was, of unreasoning, hopeless hatred of himself, of his fate, and even of the man who was his rival, though at his worst he reviled his frenzy, which could be so base as to rend unjustly a being without blame.

’Twas not himself who hated, but the madness in his blood which for this space ran riot.

At dawn, when the first glimmer of light began to pale the skies, he found himself sitting by the wide-thrown casement still in the attire he had worn the night before.  For the first time since he had been born his splendid normal strength had failed him and he was heavy with unnatural fatigue.  He sate looking out until the pale tint had deepened to primrose and the primrose into sunrise gold; birds wakened in the trees’ broad branches and twittered and flew forth; the sward and flowers were drenched with summer dews, and as the sun changed the drops to diamonds he gazed upon the lovely peace and breathed in the fresh fragrance of the early morn with a deep sigh, knowing his frenzy past but feeling that it had left him a changed man.

“Yes,” he said, “I have been given too beauteous and smooth a life.  Till now Fate has denied me nothing, and I have gone on my way unknowing it has been so, and fancying that if misfortune came I should bear it better than another man.  ’Twas but human vanity to believe in powers which never had been tried.  Self-command I have preached to myself, calmness and courage; for years I have believed I possessed them all and was Gerald Mertoun’s master, and yet at the first blow I spend hours of the night in madness and railing against Fate.  But one thing I can comfort myself with—­that I wore a calm face and could speak like a man—­until I was alone.  Thank God for that.”

As he sate he laid his plans for the future, knowing that he must lay out for himself such plans and be well aware of what he meant to do, that he might at no time betray himself to his kinsman and by so doing cast a shadow on his joy.

“Should he guess that it has been paid for by my despair,” he said, “’twould be so marred for his kind heart that I know not how he would bear the thought.  ’Twould be to him as if he had found himself the rival of the son he loved.  He has loved me, Heaven knows, and I have loved him.  Tis an affection which must last.”