No interpretation of this came to me. I planned and carried out my day according to his suggestion; a slow dressing with much cold water, a slow breakfast with much good hot coffee, a slow wandering beneath the dreamy branches of Udolpho,--this course cleared my head of the Bombo, and brought back to me our whole evening, and every word I had said to John, except that I had lost the solution which, last night, the triangle had held for me. At that moment, the triangle, and my whole dealing with the subject of monogamy, had seemed to contain the simplicity of genius; but it had all gone now, and I couldn’t get it back; only, what I had contrived to say to John about his own predicament had been certainly well said; I would say that over again to-day. It was the boy and the meaning of his words which escaped me still, baffled me, and formed the whole subject of my attention, even when I was inside the Tern Creek church; so that I retain nothing of that, save a general quaintness, a general loneliness, a little deserted, forgotten token of human doings long since done, standing on its little acre of wilderness amid that solitude which suggests the departed presence of man, and which is so much more potent in the flavor of its desolation than the virgin wilderness whose solitude is still waiting for man to come. It made no matter whether John had believed in the friend to whom I intended writing advice, or had seen through and accepted in good part my manoeuvre; he had considered my words, that was the point; and he had not slept in his bed, but on it, if sleep had come to him at all; this I found out while dressing. Several times I read his note over. “Between alternate injuries he may find it harder to choose.” This was not an answer to me, but an explanation of his own perplexity. At times it sounded almost like an appeal, as if he were saying, “Do not blame me for not being convinced;” and if it was such appeal, why, then, taken with his resolve to do right at any cost, and his night of inward contention, it was poignant. “I believe that you will help your friend.” Those words sounded better. But--“tell him a Southern gentleman ought to be shot either way.” What was the meaning of this? A chill import rose from it into my thoughts, but that I dismissed. To die on account of Hortense! Such a thing was not to be conceived. And yet, given a high-strung nature, not only trapped by its own standards, but also wrought upon during many days by increasing exasperation and unhappiness while helpless in the trap, and with no other outlook but the trap: the chill import returned to me more than once, and was reasoned away, as, with no attention to my surroundings, I took a pair of oars, and got into a boat belonging to the lodge, and rowed myself slowly among the sluggish windings of Tern Creek.