When Jethro Bass walked out of the hotel that evening men looked at him, and made way for him, but none spoke to him.  There was something in his face that forbade speech.  He was a great man once more—­a greater man than ever; and he had, if the persistent rumors were true, accomplished an almost incomprehensible feat, even for Jethro Bass.  There was another reason, too, why they stared at him.  In all those twelve weeks of that most trying of all sessions he had not once gone into the street, and he had been less than ever common in the eyes of men.  Twice a day he had descended to the dining room for a simple meal—­that was all; and fewer had gained entrance to Room Number 7 this session than ever before.

There is a river that flows by the capital, a wide and gentle river bordered by green meadows and fringed with willows; higher up, if you go far enough, a forest comes down to the water on the western side.  Jethro walked through the hooded bridge, and up the eastern bank until he could see the forest like a black band between the orange sky and the orange river, and there he sat down upon a fallen log on the edge of the bank.  But Jethro was thinking of another scene,—­of a granite-ribbed pasture on Coniston Mountain that swings in limitless space, from either end of which a man may step off into eternity.  William Wetherell, in one of his letters, had described that place as the Threshold of the Nameless Worlds, and so it had seemed to Jethro in the years of his desolation.  He was thinking of it now, even as it had been in his mind that winter’s evening when Cynthia had come to Coniston and had surprised him with that look of terrible loneliness on his face.

Yes, and he was thinking of Cynthia.  When, indeed, had he not been thinking of her?  How many tunes had he rehearsed the events in the tannery house—­for they were the events of his life now.  The triumphs over his opponents and enemies fell away, and the pride of power.  Such had not been his achievements.  She had loved him, and no man had reached a higher pinnacle than that.

Why he had forfeited that love for vengeance, he could not tell.  The embers of a man’s passions will suddenly burst into flame, and he will fiddle madly while the fire burns his soul.  He had avenged her as well as himself; but had he avenged her, now that he held Isaac Worthington in his power?  By crushing him, had he not added to her trouble and her sorrow?  She had confessed that she loved Isaac Worthington’s son, and was not he (Jethro) widening the breach between Cynthia and the son by crushing the father?  Jethro had not thought of this.  But he had thought of her, night and day, as he had sat in his room directing the battle.  Not a day had passed that he had not looked for a letter, hoping against hope.  If she had written to him once, if she had come to him once, would he have desisted?  He could not say—­the fires of hatred had burned so fiercely, and still burned so fiercely, that he clenched his fists when it came over him that Isaac Worthington was at last in his power.