What answer Madison made he never knew himself—he only knew that he was staring at the door after Thornton had gone out, and that he wanted to laugh crazily. Marry Helena! Thornton had asked Helena to marry him because he loved her. God, there was humor here! His brain itself seemed to cackle at it—marry Helena!
And then suddenly there seemed no humor at all—only black, infamous shame and condemnation—and he straightened up from where he
leaned against the bedpost, his face set and strained.
"Thornton had asked Helena to marry him because he loved her"—the words came slowly, haltingly, aloud—and then he covered his face with his hands. But he, he who loved her too—what had he done!
—XXII—
THE SHRINE
For a little time Madison stood there in his room, motionless, staring unseeingly before him—and then, as one awakening from a dream that had brought dismay and a torment too realistic to be thrown from him on the instant, his brain still a little blunted, he took up his hat mechanically, went out from the room, descended by the back stairs to the rear door of the hotel, and took the road to the Patriarch's cottage.
And as he walked in the freshness of the night, the restless turmoil of his soul that since early afternoon had brought him near to the verge of madness itself, that had robbed him of sane virility, that a moment since in his room had suddenly begun to lift from him even as the leaden clouds in the vault above him now were scattering, breaking, and through the rifts a moon-glint and the starlight came, passed from him utterly—and a strange calm, a strange joy, a strange sadness was upon him—and his brain for the first time in many hours was rational, keen—and he was master of himself again—and yet master of himself no more!
He smiled a little at the seeming paradox—smiled a little wistfully. He was beaten—by the game—he had won. How strange it was that sense of more than resignation now—a sense that seemed like one of thankfulness—a sense that bade him fling wide his arms as though suddenly they had been loosed from bondage and he was free, free as the God-given air around him.