The more he felt this, and the more he knew he
could have better borne to see her lying prematurely
dead before him with their little child upon her breast,
the higher and the stronger rose his wrath against
his enemy. He looked about him for a weapon.
There was a gun, hanging on the wall. He took
it down, and moved a pace or two towards the door
of the perfidious Stranger's room. He knew the gun
was loaded. Some shadowy idea that it was just to
shoot this man like a wild beast, seized him, and
dilated in his mind until it grew into a monstrous
demon in complete possession of him, casting out all
milder thoughts and setting up its undivided empire.
That phrase is wrong. Not casting out his milder
thoughts, but artfully transforming them. Chang-
ing them into scourges to drive him on. Turning
water into blood, love into hate, gentleness into blind
ferocity. Her image, sorrowing, humbled, but still
pleading to his tenderness and mercy with resistless
power, never left his mind; but, staying there, it
urged him to the door; raised the weapon to his
shoulder; fitted and nerved his finger to the trigger;
and cried 'Kill him! In his bed!'
He reversed the gun to beat the stock upon the
door; he already held it lifted in the air; some in-
distinct design was in his thoughts of calling out to
him to fly, for God's sake, by the window --
When, suddenly, the struggling fire illumined the
whole chimney with a glow of light; and the Cricket
on the Hearth began to Chirp!
No sound he could have heard, no human voice,
not even hers, could so have moved and softened
him.
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