later, to torture himself with conjecture which room might be Emily’s.  His sufferings were unutterable.  What devil—­he groaned—­had sent upon him this torment?  He wished he were as in former days, when the indifference he felt towards his wife’s undeniable beauty had, as it seemed, involved all womankind.  In those times he could not have conceived a madness such as this.  How had it arisen?  Was it a physical illness?  Was it madness in truth, or the beginning of it?  Why had it not taken him four months ago, when he met this girl at the Baxendales’?  But he remembered that even then she had attracted him strangely; he had quitted the others to talk to her.  He must have been prepared to conceive this frantic passion on coming together with her again.

Love alone, so felt and so frustrated, would have been bad enough; it was the added pang of jealousy that made it a fierce agony.  It was well that the man she had chosen was not within his reach; his mood was that of a murderer.  The very heat and vigour of his physical frame, the native violence of his temper, disposed him to brute fury, if an instinct such as this once became acute; and the imaginative energy which lurked in him, a sort of undeveloped genius, was another source of suffering beyond that which ordinary men endure.  He was a fine creature in these hours, colossal, tragic; it needed this experience to bring out all there was of great and exceptional in his character.  He was not of those who can quit the scene of their fruitless misery and find forgetfulness at a distance.  Every searing stroke drove him more desperately in pursuit of his end.  He was further from abandoning it, now that he knew another stood in his way, than he would have been if Emily had merely rejected him.  He would not yield her to another man; he swore to himself that he would not, let it cost him and her what it might.

He had seen her again, with his glass, from the windows of the mill, had scarcely moved his eyes from her for an hour.  A hope came to him that she might by chance walk at evening on the Heath, but he was disappointed; Emily, indeed, had long shunned walks in that direction.  He had no other means of meeting her, yet he anguished for a moment’s glimpse of her face.

To-day he knew a cruel assuagement of his torture.  He had returned from his short absence with a resolve to risk an attempt which was only not entirely base by virtue of the passion which inspired it, and it appeared to him that his stratagem had succeeded.  Scruples he had indeed known, but not at all of the weight they would have possessed for most men, and this not only because of his reckless determination to win by any means; his birth and breeding enabled him to accept meanness as almost a virtue in many of the relations and transactions of life.  The trickery and low cunning of the mercantile world was in his blood; it would come out when great occasion saw use for it, even in the service of love.