And what about those weeks not very long after that dance, when he had gone off to the land-sale at Edmonton (that was the journey, by the way, when he first saw Anita!), and Rachel had stayed at home, with a girl friend, a girl they knew in Winnipeg? But that girl hadn't stayed all the time. To do her justice, Rachel had made no secret of that. He remembered her attacking him when he came home for having left her for three or four days quite alone. Why had he been so long away? Probably a mere bluff--though he had been taken in by it at the time, and being still in love with her, had done his best to appease her. But what had she been doing all the time she was alone? In the light of what he knew now, she might have been doing anything. _Was the child his_? So, piece by piece, with no auditor but his own brain, shut in upon himself by the isolation which his own life had forged for him, he built up a hideous indictment against the woman he had once loved. He wished he had put off his interview with her till he had had time to think things out more. As he came to realize how she had tricked and bested him, her offence became incredibly viler than it seemed at first. He had let her off far too cheaply that night at the farm. Scenes of past violence returned upon him, and the memory of them seemed to satisfy a rising thirst. Especially the recollection of the divorce proceedings maddened him. His morbid brain took hold on them with a grip that his will could not loosen. Her evidence--he had read it in the Winnipeg newspapers--the remarks of the prating old judge--and of her cad of a lawyer--good God! And all the time it was _she_ who ought to have been in the dock, and he the accuser, if he had known--if he hadn't been a trusting idiot, a bleating fool. A brooding intensity of rage, as this inward process went on, gradually drowned in him every other feeling and desire. The relief and amusement of the money and its spending were soon over. He thought no more of it. Anita, and his child even--the child for whom he really cared--passed out of his mind. As he sat drinking whisky in the dull respectable lodging, at night after Anita had gone to bed, he felt the sinister call of those dark woods above Rachel's farm, and tasted the sweetness of his new power to hurt her, now that she had paid him this blackmail, and damned herself thereby--past help. She had threatened him. But what could she do--or the Yankee fellow either? She had given the show away. As for his promise, when he had no right to make it,--no right to allow such a woman to get off scot-free, with plenty of money and a new lover.