But William’s gaze did not meet hers.  He was looking into the fire and seeing what had occurred with wholly different eyes.  To him everything was altered, and nothing could ever make the relation between them what it had been.  No tenderness of affection, no length of association, no faithfulness of service, could stand for an instant against a single one of the many blows that his morbid self-love had received.  For self-love like his is an incurable disease of sensibility, a spreading canker which poisons the whole character, as an unsound spot in the flesh poisons the whole body.  To those who have not come in close contact with this form of morbidity, it may seem impossible that William Pressley’s love for Ruth, which had been real so far as it went, should have hardened into dislike almost as soon as the words that wounded it had left her lips.  Yet that was precisely what had taken place, quite naturally and even inevitably.  He had loved her as much as he was capable of loving, mainly because of the deep gratification which he found in her great esteem for himself.  No one else had ever come so near granting his self-love all that it demanded.  Her sweet presence, always looking up to him, had been like the perpetual swinging of a censer perpetually giving the fragrant incense that his vanity craved.  And now all this was changed.  The gentle acolyte was gone, the censer no longer swung, and instead there was a keen critic armed with words as hard as stones.  No, there was nothing strange in the fact that, when William Pressley finally turned his gaze on Ruth, he looked at her as if she had been a stranger whom he had never seen before; an utter stranger, and one moreover whose presence was so utterly antagonistic to him that there was not the remotest possibility of any liking between them.  But he said nothing, and gave no indication of what he felt.  No feeling was ever strong enough to cause him to say or do an unconsidered thing.  In this, as in all things, he waited to be sure that he was doing what would place himself in the best possible light.  While he had never a moment’s doubt of being wholly in the right, he thought it best to wait and consider his own appearance in the matter.  And then, just at that time, political affairs were claiming his first attention, for that was a period of intense public stress.

XIV

A SPIRITUAL CENTAUR

The whole wilderness, the whole country, the whole heart of the nation, was now aflame over the coming conflict at Tippecanoe.

Father Orin, like every one else, was thinking of this, a day or so later, as he rode along the forest path.  There was a heavy weight in his merciful breast as he looked across the river.  Over there, beyond those spectral cottonwoods and on the banks of its tributary, the Wabash, the white and the red races were about to meet in a supreme struggle now close at hand.  He had just been told that Joe Daviess had offered his sword, and the news had brought the public trouble home to his own heart, for he loved the man.