This thought lodged like a barb in my heart and my feet suddenly turned to lead. I could not go on farther and irresistibly I felt myself drawn homeward.
The somber habit of my recent reflections urged me with a plausibility strange and inexplicable to enter my study by the window instead of the comparatively public door. The window nearly always stood open. In case of storm Griselda or Alicia would dash about the house and close the windows, beginning always with my study. But this day had been clear.
I tiptoed around through the garden to the side upon which my study window gives. From it the land slopes away under a covering of trees until it reaches the stream.
There was a light in the study, though the shade was drawn, flapping gently against the rusty wire screen. This shade, as it happens, does not quite fit. It is short a full half-inch on either side, so that the peering observer can see as much as he pleases of what is going on in that room when it is lighted.
Automatically, without any premeditation that I can now recall, I gazed into my own room like a prowling thief. The picture I saw riveted me to the spot with an irresistible magnetic force.
Alicia was reclining on my leather couch, seemingly asleep. Instinctively I knew that she had decided to wait up for me and with some book in her hands had nodded in her vigil. It was still early, but Alicia's day began early and was always charged with activity. What an exquisite picture she made as she lay there in her thin frock, with a look of childlike trust and unconsciousness—radiating beauty.
Pendleton, who at that moment entered the door of the study, possibly to find Alicia, stood for a few moments spellbound by the picture, even as I stood outside. My burglarious entry was now frustrated. I must make use of the door. But I could not move from the spot. Somehow I could not let Pendleton out of my sight.
How dared he look at her in that manner!
My nerves were suddenly tense and my muscles quivering. Strange unfamiliar thoughts of savage acts, of sudden violence, of thrusts and blows, of blood-lust seethed and bubbled within me like a lurid boiling pitch. The inhibitions and restraints of a lifetime, however, held me writhing as in a vise.
I turned away for a twinkling as though to gather resolution from the murmurous night.