Stephen Archdale had come to Boston to collect whatever facts he could about Harwin, and about the places and the people that the confession referred to.  Nothing was farther from his thoughts than any such visit.  It was his wish that Elizabeth and himself need never meet again, and he knew that it was hers.  Indeed, so far from thinking of the woman who was perhaps his wife, he was living over again the glimpse he had had of the one from whom he had been separated.  Three days ago he had taken his gun early in the morning and had gone out hunting, made more miserable than before by something he had perceived in his father’s mind.  The Colonel was not in sympathy with him; he was consoling himself that, after all, Elizabeth Royal was a richer woman than Katie Archdale.  At his light insinuation of this to his son, the young man had flamed out into a heat of passion and declared that one golden hair of Katie’s head was worth both Elizabeth and her fortune.  He had rushed out of the house with the wish for destroying something in his mind.  As he stopped in the hall to snatch his gun, the flintlock caught, and tore a hole in the tapestry hanging.  He saw it, pushed the great stag’s antlers that the gun had been swung on a little aside, and covered the torn place.  Then he forgot the accident almost as soon as this was done, left the house and went striding over the fields, not so much to chase the foxes, as to be alone.  And when that point was gained he would have gone a step further if he could and escaped from himself also.  But he was only all the more with his own thoughts as he wandered aimlessly through great stretches of pine trees with the light snow of the night before still white on their lower boughs, except when in some opening it had melted into dewdrops in the December sun, and still clung to the trees, ready when the sun had passed by them towards its setting to turn into filmy icicles.  The sky was brilliant; the long winter already upon the earth smiled gently, as if to say that its reign would be mild.  Stephen went along so much preoccupied that only the baying of his hound made him notice the light fox-prints by the roadside.  Then the instinct of the hunter stirred within him, and he followed on, listening now and then to the distant bark while pursued and the pursuer were going farther away.  He waited, knowing fox nature well and that there were a hundred chances to one that the creature would come back near the spot from which it was started.  As he waited close by the road which here led through the woods, two men passed along it without seeing him.  They were talking as they went.  Stephen knew them; one was an old man who used to be a servant in the family when Colonel Archdale was a boy.  He had married long ago and was now living in a little house not far from his old home.  The young man with him was his son.  Stephen was in no mood even for a passing word, and he stood still, perceiving that a clump of bushes hid him.  A few sentences of the conversation reached him through the stillness, but it meant nothing to him; he was not conscious even of listening until Katie’s name caught his ear.  They were talking of this marriage then, as every body was; he was the gossip of the very servants.  But his attention once caught was held until the speakers passed out of hearing.  Surely they knew nothing about the matter that he did not.