A peace so profound as to be almost unnatural had settled over the land, one or two stars had come out, and I wondered vaguely why Amos and his people had not yet returned home from work. I supposed that they were making the most of a fine evening. The Pennistans would accept their daughter’s defeat, I was sure, with the usual stoic indifference of the poor. At last I turned slowly in the doorway, a great melancholy soaking like dew into my bones, so that I fancied I felt the physical ache. Now I have but the one concluding incident to tell, before I have done with this portion of my cumbersome, disjointed story, an incident which has since appeared to me frightening in its appositeness, as though deliberately planned by some diabolically finished artist as a rounding of the whole. Malory had spoken of destiny and nature as being the only artists of any humour or courage, and upon my soul I am tempted to agree with him when I think over the events of that packed evening, of which I was the sole and baffled spectator. I said this incident appeared to me frightening; I repeat that statement, for I can conceive of no situation more frightening than for a man to find himself and other human beings shoved hither and thither by events over which he has no control whatsoever, the conduct of life taken entirely out of his hands, especially a man, like me, had always struggled resentfully against the imposition of fate on free-will, but never more so than in the past few weeks. Wherever I turned that night, mockery was there ready to greet me. I went again, as I have said, into the house with the intention of waiting in the kitchen on Amos’s return. In this small plan as in my larger ones I was, it appeared, to be thwarted, for as I passed down the narrow passage I noticed that the door of old Mrs. Pennistan’s room was open. I paused at first with no thought of alarm. I longed to go in, and to tell the ancient woman of the futile suffering she had brought upon her hapless descendants. I longed insanely to shout it into her brain and to see remorse wake to life in her faded eyes. As I stood near her door she grew for me into a huge, portentous figure, she and her love for Oliver Pennistan, and I saw her, the tiny woman I had all but forgotten, as a consciously evil spirit, a malign influence, the spring from which all this river of sorrow had flowed. Then my steps were drawn nearer and nearer to the door, till I stood at last on the threshold, looking for the first time into the room. Some one, presumably the now invisible servant, had lit the two candles on the dressing-table, and these with the glow of the fire between the bars threw over the room a fitful light. I had, curiously enough, no sense of intrusion; I might have been looking at a mummy. Yet I should have remembered that the occupant was not a mummy, for the familiar smell of the chestnuts had greeted me even in the passage.