But it was only for a moment. The man's hard energy of character, his iron will, his rigid self-control, though they had gone down before the suddenness and severity of the shock, quickly rose again. With a mighty effort, he rallied his broken forces; back into his face came the look of purpose, the sense of power, the sternness of immitigable resolve; and this with so rapid and almost imperceptible a change, that it seemed as if the granite man must have stood there from the first, and the weak man not at all. While Tracey's receding footsteps still echoed faintly from without, going swiftly in the direction of the city's principal thoroughfare,--while the murmur of voices from above was still at its eager, wondering height,--he had turned, noiselessly descended the steps, and was gliding down through the sombre elm-arches, swift and stealthy as a phantom. The street was shadowy at best, but he chose the darker side; it was wellnigh deserted, at that hour, but he soon turned into a still less frequented one, and then struck into a more assured and less noiseless, as well as swifter, pace. As he went, he drew a ring from his finger, and glancing hastily round, to make sure that he was unobserved, he flung it far into the dusky shadow of a garden thicket. Only the day before, a friend had said to him,--"Roath, do you know that the stone is gone from your ring?" and he had answered,--"Yes; and I am sorry to have lost it, for it was my father's." And he had proceeded to point out the antique setting, and to describe the peculiar shape and tint of the gem which it had inclosed. He gnashed his teeth as he recalled the short, but momentous conversation. But for that, he would not have fled. The garden into which he had flung the ring adjoined a small cottage; and, at one of the open windows, a gray-haired dame sat in a high-backed chair, listening to the clear, musical voice of an invisible reader. This fragment of a sentence floated out to him on the dim night air,--"_He shall be holden with the cords of--_" Even at that moment, the words struck him sharply. Involuntarily he slackened his pace, and half-turned to catch the remainder of the sentence, but it was inaudible. The uncertainty before him, the terror behind, were, for the time, almost forgotten in a certain chill curiosity. "Holden with the cords--holden with the cords," he repeated to himself, as he hurried on,--"I wonder what book she was reading! I should really like to hear the end of that sentence!" Still keeping up his swift pace and vigilant glance, he nevertheless sank into a partial abstraction. Some disconnected sentences, breaking at intervals from his lips, served to show the current of his thoughts.