The white lips parted, but no sound issued from them.  She raised her white hand and clutched at her throat as if choking.  Then she trembled, gasped, reeled, and fell forward into his arms.

In a moment more, the agitated heart had ceased to beat, and the secret of her life was hidden in its mysterious silence.  The sudden, inexplicable and calamitous nature of this event came near unsettling the mental balance of the sensitive and highly organized youth.  Coming as it did upon the very heels of the experiences which had so thoroughly shaken his faith in the old life, he felt himself to be the target for every arrow in the quiver of misfortune.

He seemed to himself not so much like a boat that had sprung a single leak, as like one out of which every nail had been pulled and the joints left open to the inrushing waters.

Into the unfilled gap in his mother’s narrative, ten thousand suspicions crept, each displacing the other and leaving him more and more in darkness and in dread with regard to the origin of his own life.  Wherever he went and whatever he did these confused suspicions resounded in his ears like the murmur in a seashell.

He did not dare communicate this story even to his sister; for if she knew nothing he feared to poison her existence by telling her, and if she knew all he had not the courage to listen to the sequel.  Perhaps no other experience in life produces a more profound shock than a discovery like that upon which David had so suddenly stumbled.  It leads to despair or to melancholy, and many a life of highest promise has been suddenly wrecked by it.  While he brooded over this mystery the days slipped past the young mystic almost unnoted; he wandered about the farm, passing from one fit of abstraction into another, doing nothing, saying nothing, thinking everything.

The world was shrouded in a gloom through whose shifting mists a single star shone now and then, emitting a brilliant and dazzling ray.  It was the figure of a gypsy.

In his heavy, aching heart thoughts of her alone aroused an emotion of joy.  As other objects lost their power to attract or charm, she more and more filled all his horizon.

Her name was whispered by each passing breeze.  It was syllabled by every singing bird.  The old clock ticked it on the stairway.  The hoofs of his horse which he rode recklessly over the country uttered it to the hard roads on which they fell—­“Pepeeta, Pepeeta, Pepeeta.”

Whenever he really tried to banish the temptations which haunted his soul, they always returned to the swept and garnished chamber bringing with them seven spirits worse than themselves.

He tried to look forward to the future with hope.  But how can a man hope for harvests, when all his seed corn has been destroyed?  If his father was bad, what hope was there that he could be better?

He made innumerable resolves to take up the duties of life where he had laid them down, but they were all like birds which die in the nest where they are born.