"What am I going to do?"
He returned to the street of his birth and hurried up the well-known stairs. The key of the room was still in his pocket—he had never surrendered the old quarters. It was a superstition and a sentiment unique in his life. He entered the room and looked about solicitously. Nothing had been disturbed. Mechanically, still confused, he went to the trunk and was taking out the bedding when in dismay he recollected himself and shoved it hurriedly back. Then seating himself on the bed, his head imprisoned in his hands, he repeated:
"What am I going to do?"
This time the question had the vigor of an explosion. He no longer could abandon himself to the torrents of his rage. That emotion had left him in weakness and fear. But gradually, in the cold succeeding calm, a germ of a new passion formed and gathered violence,—the germ of vengeance.
At the end of an hour of anguish he leaped to his feet with a shout of victory and, refreshed and alert, again rushed down the stairs and set out resolutely for the upper city.
CHAPTER XV THE IRONICAL MOMENT
Three hours later Fargus dragged himself home, still limp with the violence of that first uncontrolled burst of vengeance, which, like all the passions, had been too intense in its inception not to necessitate an exhausted reaction. But during these three hours he had already put into motion that conception of a punishment which had come to him like a flash at the end of his maddened flight through the city.
What was hardest was to return home. When he reached the street it was already dark and the light in the second story was showing cheerily, while from the hall the veiled glow spread a feeling of delicious warmth. At the sight of the home he had grown so passionately to love such a lust for murder welled up in him that, not daring to look upon Sheila's treacherous face, he fled again.