“Has war come at last?”

That was the headline.  One’s heart leapt to assent. . . .

There were hours that day when I clean forgot Nettie, in dreaming of battles and victories by land and sea, of shell fire, and entrenchments, and the heaped slaughter of many thousands of men.

But the next morning I started for Checkshill, started, I remember, in a curiously hopeful state of mind, oblivious of comets, strikes, and wars.

Section 5

You must understand that I had no set plan of murder when I walked over to Checkshill.  I had no set plan of any sort.  There was a great confusion of dramatically conceived intentions in my head, scenes of threatening and denunciation and terror, but I did not mean to kill.  The revolver was to turn upon my rival my disadvantage in age and physique. . . .

But that was not it really!  The revolver!—­I took the revolver because I had the revolver and was a foolish young lout.  It was a dramatic sort of thing to take.  I had, I say, no plan at all.

Ever and again during that second trudge to Checkshill I was irradiated with a novel unreasonable hope.  I had awakened in the morning with the hope, it may have been the last unfaded trail of some obliterated dream, that after all Nettie might relent toward me, that her heart was kind toward me in spite of all that I imagined had happened.  I even thought it possible that I might have misinterpreted what I had seen.  Perhaps she would explain everything.  My revolver was in my pocket for all that.

I limped at the outset, but after the second mile my ankle warmed to forgetfulness, and the rest of the way I walked well.  Suppose, after all, I was wrong?

I was still debating that, as I came through the park.  By the corner of the paddock near the keeper’s cottage, I was reminded by some belated blue hyacinths of a time when I and Nettie had gathered them together.  It seemed impossible that we could really have parted ourselves for good and all.  A wave of tenderness flowed over me, and still flooded me as I came through the little dell and drew towards the hollies.  But there the sweet Nettie of my boy’s love faded, and I thought of the new Nettie of desire and the man I had come upon in the moonlight, I thought of the narrow, hot purpose that had grown so strongly out of my springtime freshness, and my mood darkened to night.

I crossed the beech wood and came towards the gardens with a resolute and sorrowful heart.  When I reached the green door in the garden wall I was seized for a space with so violent a trembling that I could not grip the latch to lift it, for I no longer had any doubt how this would end.  That trembling was succeeded by a feeling of cold, and whiteness, and self-pity.  I was astonished to find myself grimacing, to feel my cheeks wet, and thereupon I gave way completely to a wild passion of weeping.  I must take just a little time before the thing was done. . . .  I turned away from the door and stumbled for a little distance, sobbing loudly, and lay down out of sight among the bracken, and so presently became calm again.  I lay there some time.  I had half a mind to desist, and then my emotion passed like the shadow of a cloud, and I walked very coolly into the gardens.