He was trying, with the alternate quickness and inaction of an inexperienced intellect and an imagination morbidly awakened, to grasp the situation before him.  The common sense that had hitherto governed his life told him that the deputy would go to-morrow, and that there was nothing in his wife’s conduct to show that her coquetry and aberration would not pass as easily.  But it recurred to him that she had never shown this coquetry or aberration to him during their own brief courtship,—­that she had never looked or acted like this before.  If this was love, she had never known it; if it was only “women’s ways,” as he had heard men say, and so dangerously attractive, why had she not shown it to him?  He remembered that matter-of-fact wedding, the bride without timidity, without blushes, without expectation beyond the transference of her home to his.  Would it have been different with another man?—­with the deputy, who had called this color and animation to her face?  What did it all mean?  Were all married people like this?  There were the Westons, their neighbors,—­was Mrs. Weston like Sue?  But he remembered that Mrs. Weston had run away with Mr. Weston from her father’s house.  It was what they called “a love match.”  Would Sue have run away with him?  Would she now run away with—?

The candle was guttering as he rose with a fierce start—­his first impulse of anger—­from the table.  He took another gulp of whiskey.  It tasted like water; its fire was quenched in the greater heat of his blood.  He would go to bed.  Here a new and indefinable timidity took possession of him; he remembered the strange look in his wife’s face.  It seemed suddenly as if the influence of the sleeping stranger in the next room had not only isolated her from him, but would make his presence in her bedroom an intrusion on their hidden secrets.  He had to pass the open door of the kitchen.  The head of the unconscious deputy was close to Ira’s heavy boot.  He had only to lift his heel to crush that ruddy, good-looking, complacent face.  He hurried past him, up the creaking stairs.  His wife lay still on one side of the bed, apparently asleep, her face half-hidden in her loosened, fluffy hair.  It was well; for in the vague shyness and restraint that was beginning to take possession of him he felt he could not have spoken to her, or, if he had, it would have been only to voice the horrible, unformulated things that seemed to choke him.  He crept softly to the opposite side of the bed, and began to undress.  As he pulled off his boots and stockings, his eye fell upon his bare, malformed feet.  This caused him to look at his maimed hand, to rise, drag himself across the floor to the mirror, and gaze upon his lacerated ear.  She, this prettily formed woman lying there, must have seen it often; she must have known all these years that he was not like other men,—­not like the deputy, with his tight riding-boots, his soft hand, and the diamond that sparkled vulgarly on his fat little finger.  A cold sweat broke over him.  He drew on his stockings again, lifted the outer counterpane, and, half undressed, crept under it, wrapping its corner around his maimed hand, as if to hide it from the light.  Yet he felt that he saw things dimly; there was a moisture on his cheeks and eyelids he could not account for; it must be the whiskey “coming out.”