He seemed a little embarrassed and ill at ease, and Ste. Marie said: 

“Oh, thanks.  There’s no hurry.  However, I’ll go, I think.  It’s after eleven.  I understand that I’m on my honor not to climb over the wall or burrow under it or batter it down.  That’s understood.  I—­”

He felt that he ought to say something in acknowledgment of O’Hara’s long speech about his daughter, but he could think of nothing to say, and, besides, the Irishman seemed not to expect any comment upon his strange outburst.  So, in the end, Ste. Marie nodded and went out of the room without further ceremony.

He had been astonished almost beyond words at that sudden and unlooked-for breakdown of the other man’s impregnable reserve, and dimly he realized that it must have come out of some very extraordinary nervous strain, but he himself had been in no state to give the Irishman’s words the attention and thought that he would have given them at another time.  His mind, his whole field of mental vision, had been full of one great fact—­the girl was to be married to young Arthur Benham.  The thing loomed gigantic before him, and in some strange way terrifying.  He could neither see nor think beyond it.  O’Hara’s burst of confidence had reached his ears very faintly, as if from a great distance—­poignant but only half-comprehended words to be reflected upon later in their own time.

He stumbled down the ill-lighted stair with fixed, wide, unseeing eyes, and he said one sentence over and over aloud, as the Irishman standing beside the window had said another.

“She is going to be married.  She is going to be married.”

It would seem that he must have forgotten his previous half-suspicion of the fact.  It would seem to have remained, as at the first hearing, a great and appalling shock, thunderous out of a blue sky.

Below, in the open, his feet led him mechanically straight down under the trees, through the tangle of shrubbery beyond, and so to the wall under the cedar.  Arrived there, he awoke all at once to his task, and with a sort of frowning anger shook off the dream which enveloped him.  His eyes sharpened and grew keen and eager.  He said: 

“The last arrow!  God send it reached home!” and so went in under the lilac shrubs.

He was there longer than usual; unhampered now, he may have made a larger search, but when at last he emerged Ste. Marie’s hands were over his face and his feet dragged slowly like an old man’s feet.

Without knowing that he had stirred he found himself some distance away, standing still beside a chestnut-tree.  A great wave of depression and fear and hopelessness swept him, and he shivered under it.  He had an instant’s wild panic, and mad, desperate thoughts surged upon him.  He saw utter failure confronting him.  He saw himself as helpless as a little child, his feeble efforts already spent for naught, and, like a little child, he was afraid.  He would have rushed at that grim encircling wall and fought his way up and over it, but even as the impulse raced to his feet the momentary madness left him and he turned away.  He could not do a dishonorable thing even for all he held dearest.