For a moment he stood gazing, stolidly it seemed, out of the window. Only the dull leaden look creeping over his face, and, presently, the panting breath gave indication of the shock he had received.
That his wife, whom he had considered as pure as the angels in Heaven, should take advantage of his first absence to meet another man clandestinely—another man! Bah! an old lover, for did she not kiss him at parting? Yes, that much the glasses had enabled him to see. The thought was agony, a thousand times worse than death.
“Oh, Alice! Alice! my love, my wife! How could you!” he cried to the unhearing walls, as he put his hand to his head with a gesture of infinite pain.
That, however, was the last wail of love’s weakness; then the frenzy of jealousy and revenge seized him and possessed him like a demon, and the look on his face, as he took a revolver from a secret panel in the bureau, boded ill for his future happiness.
“Fooled, the very first month of my marriage too!” he muttered; and the words seemed ground out between his clenched teeth.
“——But I will clear this thing up or put an end to it once for all, even if in doing so I have to put an end——”
His voice sank as he passed from a side door and stole rapidly through the garden to intercept the man who had just left his wife.
The narrow path through the woods brought him out, as he had anticipated, in advance of the person whom he had come to meet.
He saw him coming along a hundred yards or so away, and he felt, mixed up with his murderous feelings, a craving to see the face of the man for whom his wife had forgotten him even in their honeymoon.
The stranger bade him good-evening with an easy, nonchalant air, and was passing on his way to the station.