He turned softly and went down the bank to the river and walked away over the ice.  When he had put five hundred yards between himself and that house, he turned to look back.  He put his hand to his face and wiped away drops of sweat, a clammy exudation that broke out all over his body very much as if he had just become aware of escaping by a hair’s breadth some imminent and terrible disaster.  In truth that was precisely his feeling,—­as if he had been capering madly on the brink of some fearful abyss which he could not see until it was revealed to him in a terrifying flash.

He shivered.  His ego grovelled in the dirt.  He had often smiled at theories of dual personality.  But standing there on the frozen stream with the white hills looming high above the green-forested lowlands he was no longer sure of anything, least of all whether in him might lurk a duality of forces which could sway him as they would.  Either that, or he had gone mad for a while, a brief madness born of sex-hunger, of isolation, of brooding over unassuaged bitterness.

Perhaps he might have done what he set out to do if the man had not been there.  But he did not think so now.  The brake of his real manhood had begun to set upon those wild impulses before he drew up to the door and looked in the window.  What he saw there only cleared with a brusque hand the cobwebs from his brain.

Fundamentally, Hollister hated trickery, deceit, unfairness, double-dealing.  In his normal state he would neither lie, cheat, nor steal.  He had grown up with a natural tendency to regard his own ethics as the common attribute of others.  There had somehow been born in him, or had developed as an intrinsic part of his character early in life, a child-like, trustful quality of faith in human goodness.  And that faith had begun to reel under grievous blows dealt it in the last four years.

Myra was not worth the taking, even if he had a legal and moral right to take her (not that he attempted to justify himself now by any such sophistry).  She could not be faithful, it seemed, even to a chosen lover.  The man into whose eyes she gazed with such obvious complaisance was not the man she lived with in that house on the river bank.  Hollister had watched him through the glasses often enough to know.  He was a tall, ruddy-faced man, a big man and handsome.  Hollister had looked at him often enough, reckoning him to be an Englishman, the man Myra married in London, the man for whom she had conceived such a passion that she had torn Hollister’s heart by the brutal directness of her written avowal.  Hollister had watched him swinging his ax on the woodpile, going off on those long tramps in the bottom land.  He might be within gunshot of the house at this moment.

Hollister found himself pitying this man.  He found himself wondering if it had always been that way with Myra, if she were the helpless victim of her own senses.  There were women like that.  Plenty of them.  Men too.  Sufferers from an overstimulated sexuality.  He could not doubt that.  He suspected that he was touched with it himself.