He caught sight of himself in one of the looking-glasses.  It was a relief.  The anguish of his feeling had been so powerful that he more than half expected to see some distorted wild face there, and he was pleasantly surprised to see nothing of the kind.  His aspect, at any rate, would let no one into the secret of his pain.  He examined himself with attention.  His trousers were turned up, and his boots a little muddy, but he looked very much as usual.  Only his hair was slightly ruffled, and that disorder, somehow, was so suggestive of trouble that he went quickly to the table, and began to use the brushes, in an anxious desire to obliterate the compromising trace, that only vestige of his emotion.  He brushed with care, watching the effect of his smoothing; and another face, slightly pale and more tense than was perhaps desirable, peered back at him from the toilet glass.  He laid the brushes down, and was not satisfied.  He took them up again and brushed, brushed mechanically—­forgot himself in that occupation.  The tumult of his thoughts ended in a sluggish flow of reflection, such as, after the outburst of a volcano, the almost imperceptible progress of a stream of lava, creeping languidly over a convulsed land and pitilessly obliterating any landmark left by the shock of the earthquake.  It is a destructive but, by comparison, it is a peaceful phenomenon.  Alvan Hervey was almost soothed by the deliberate pace of his thoughts.  His moral landmarks were going one by one, consumed in the fire of his experience, buried in hot mud, in ashes.  He was cooling—­on the surface; but there was enough heat left somewhere to make him slap the brushes on the table, and turning away, say in a fierce whisper:  “I wish him joy . . .  Damn the woman.”

He felt himself utterly corrupted by her wickedness, and the most significant symptom of his moral downfall was the bitter, acrid satisfaction with which he recognized it.  He, deliberately, swore in his thoughts; he meditated sneers; he shaped in profound silence words of cynical unbelief, and his most cherished convictions stood revealed finally as the narrow prejudices of fools.  A crowd of shapeless, unclean thoughts crossed his mind in a stealthy rush, like a band of veiled malefactors hastening to a crime.  He put his hands deep into his pockets.  He heard a faint ringing somewhere, and muttered to himself:  “I am not the only one . . . not the only one.”  There was another ring.  Front door!

His heart leaped up into his throat, and forthwith descended as low as his boots.  A call!  Who?  Why?  He wanted to rush out on the landing and shout to the servant:  “Not at home!  Gone away abroad!” . . .  Any excuse.  He could not face a visitor.  Not this evening.  No.  To-morrow. . . .  Before he could break out of the numbness that enveloped him like a sheet of lead, he heard far below, as if in the entrails of the earth, a door close heavily.  The house vibrated to it more than to a clap of thunder.